McCone And Friends

ONE FINAL ARRANGEMENT

Devil’s Slide, south of San Francisco, is a stretch of highway where you don’t want to push your luck, but I was pushing mine on the Yamaha, even though I had Lottie-my lady, Charlotte Keim-snuggled up behind me. It was a killer day, clear and crisp, and there wasn’t a shred of cloud in the sky. We hugged the curves above the sea, really leaned into them, and left the city and work far behind us.

At least Lottie-who’s one of my fellow operative at McCone Investigations-had left work behind. I was still steamed after having spent last night hunkered down in the rhododendrons at some guy’s Hillsborough estate, watching him go through the same damn motions that he had been going through for over a week. Watching him on a damp October night whose every chill breeze whispered the word pneumonia. And I was even more steamed about the conversation I’d had this morning with my aunt and boss, Sharon McCone.

Just thinking about it made me come up too fast at the start of a hairpin curve. I corrected in time, but Lottie’s arms tightened around me, and she said, “For God’s sake, Mick!” after that I took it slower until we got the state beach at San Gregorio. While I was securing the bike in the parking area, Lottie ran off toward the sand.

By the time I followed her, Lottie was dancing along the water’s edge, her long dark-brown curls flaring and bouncing. She saw me and called, “Last one in’s a lovesick armadillo!” Lottie’s got seven years on me, but sometimes she’s as much a kid as my little sister, and when she gets excited, the Texas accent she tried to leave behind in Archer City comes out-along with what Shar calls Lottie’s “Texasisms.” Today Lottie was as Texas as Lone Star beer.

We didn’t really plan to go in the water; it’s cold along the northern California coast, even in the summer. So I caught up with her and grabbed her hand, and we strolled south to where the beach backed up against the cliffs. There were only three people around-a daddy and two kids, maybe around seven and eight. The kids were building sand castles, and the daddy was lying on his back, his head propped on a driftwood log. Lottie and I parked it on another log and watched the construction project.

“You want to tell me about it?” she asked.

“About what?”

“Whatever’s got you tryin’ to see if that bike can fly.”

“Just a problem at work, is all. No big deal. Shar’s got me on this case that’s going no place, no way, no how. You’d think she’d give up. The woman’s fixated.”

Lottie waited.

“Okay,” I said after a minute, “this is the situation. There’s this dude, seriously weird. Name of Harry Homestead. Lives all alone in this mansion down the Peninsula that makes my dad’s place look like a homeless shelter.”

“Hard to believe that.” Lottie’s a little in awe of my father, who makes an obscene heap of money as a country singer.

“Well, believe it. Seven and a half years ago this dud married big bucks. Older lady, Susan Cross, of the oil and banking family. Way back when, her forebears robbed practically everybody dumber than them who ever trekked through Emigrant Gap. Harry, though, he was kind of questionable, being from someplace nobody ever heard of in Nebraska and having-among other things-run a carnival concession and done a stint as a dealer in Vegas. That’s where Susan met him, Vegas. And she married him a few weeks later, without a prenup. Maybe she thought he was exotic, after years of boring high-society life with her late husband. Who knows what makes people get together?”

Lottie grinned and squeezed my hand. A lot of people thought we were an unlikely couple.

“Anyway,” I went on, “one thing the two of them had in common was gardening. Harry and Susan loved flowers and spent a lot of time in the greenhouse at her Hillsborough estate. A couple of months after the wedding, one of her arrangements won what I guess you’d call the Grammy of gardening, and the picture in our file shows them with it, smiling like it was their firstborn and looking in love.”

“I take it the wedded bliss didn’t last?”

“You got it. Four months later, to the day, Susan disappeared. Vanished totally, without a trace. Leaving Harry in the Hillsborough mansion with the joint checkbooks. Everybody knew he’d murdered her, and that it was only a matter of time till he looted the accounts and split.”

“But he didn’t.”

“Nope. Harry stayed put. He didn’t even spend much money, just stayed on in the mansion and let the trust department of the bank pay the bills like they always did. He puttered around in the greenhouse, didn’t date, didn’t travel. Nobody knew if he was grieving, because he didn’t have any friends. He just lay low and cooperated with the cops who were investigating his wife’s disappearance.”

“So maybe he didn’t kill her after all.”

“Wrong again. At least, according to Shar. She and her client, Susan Cross’s attorney, claim Harry’s a patient man. He’s been waiting, they say, for the seven years to pass so he can get Susan declared legally dead. And if he has, all that waiting’ll pay off next week when he goes to court. Then all the loot’ll belong to him.”

“So that’s what’s kept you so busy lately. Trying to get the goods on Harry.”

“Yep. Shar says that all people leave traces of their crimes, and it’s just a matter of pinpointing and interpreting them. She’s sure that Harry’s feeling secure as his court date approaches and that he’s bound to do something stupid.”

“After seven years of being careful? I don’t think so.”

“That’s what I told Shar. You’d think she’d give up, wouldn’t you?”

Lottie shrugged.”Maybe, maybe not. I have a hard time giving up on anything. Even you.”

Now what the hell did that mean? I didn’t want to ask. Instead I watched the kids build their castles, and brooded about my morning conference with my aunt Sharon.

“So what’ve got here, Mick?” Shar had asked me.

She looked bright-eyed and pretty and sexy-for an old broad of forty. Her boyfriend, Hy Ripinsky, must’ve been in town. “What we’ve got is zilch,” I said.

She gave me a look that said, Impossible.

“Zilch,” I said again, but not as firmly. “Here’s how it went: Harry came out of the mansion at seven-thirty and went to the greenhouse. Stayed there till close to nine. Went inside and spent a couple hours in the room the house plans call the library.” I’d got hold of the plans in a perfectly legal way, since the mansion was registered as a state historical building. “Then he went to the master-bedroom wing, and the lights there went out around midnight.”

Shar seemed to be waiting.

“That’s all there is.” I couldn’t hold back and longer. “This surveillance is idiotic, and on top of that, I think I’ve caught a cold.”

Now she looked sad. Oh, hell was she thinking I didn’t have what it takes for the business? Normally, I don’t get to do much field work, just sit at the computer, and she told me this case was a chance to prove my abilities. “Mick,” she said after a minute, “maybe it’ll help to review the case from day one.”

“Whatever.” I slumped down in the chair, resigned to the rehash of details I already knew by heart.

Shar opened the file in front of her, paged through it. “Susan Cross disappeared on October nineteen, six months and five days after she married Harry Homestead. That morning she drove to the city, left her car for an oil change at the Sutter-Stockton garage, and kept a nine-thirty appointment at Yosh for Hair on Maiden Lane. According to Homestead, he was to meet her in the lobby of the Saint Francis at twelve-thirty and take her to a nearby restaurant for lunch. Cross never showed.

“Homestead waited at the hotel till one-thirty. Staff members saw him arrive and later go to the phones. He called the beauty salon, and they told him Cross left around eleven. He checked the restaurant, thinking they’d got their signals crossed about where to meet; called several of her friends, her attorney, and her banker, on the chance she’d stopped to see one of them and got held up. Nobody had seen her. Finally, he called the police.”

To speed things up, I said, “The cops treated it as routine, told him to wait seventy-two hours and then report her missing. Next day her lawyer stepped in, and they took it more seriously. Cops talked to the people at Yosh’s, and that’s when one weird thing came out.”

Shar nodded. “Cross told her stylist that she was going to meet Homestead’s mother later that day, and added that the woman was living in horrible circumstances. She said she hoped Mrs. Homestead would allow Harry and her to do something to help out. But when the stylist pressed for details, Cross changed the subject.”

“And later it came out that Homestead’s mother had died ten years earlier. He claimed he didn’t know why his wife would tell the stylist something like that.”

Shar flipped through the rest of the pages and closed the file. “The police started focusing their investigation on Homestead within a week. They searched the house and grounds of the estate; no body turned up. They did a complete background check on him. He came up clean except for a couple of old DUI’s. He agreed to take a polygraph test and passed. But as we know, some people can fool the lie detector.”

“Shar-”

“Cross’s family hired private detectives to try to get something on Homestead,” she went on. “Nothing. A reward was offered, and the usual nut cases came out of the woodwork. No leads. Homestead had no assets of his own, but he didn’t seem inclined to tap into his wife’s money. He’s kept a low profile for seven years, and if we don’t get something on him, next week he’s going to be handsomely rewarded for murder.”

“Did you ever consider that he didn’t do it?”

“He did.”

“Or that you might be just a tiny bit obsessed with-”

“I’m not. Harry Homestead killed his wife.”

I threw up my hands. The woman can be so exasperating! “Okay! Whatever you say! He killed her. But we can’t prove it. This case is impossible.”

“I thought I taught you better than that. No case is impossible.” She fixed me with that steely look of hers, the one that makes me feel like I’m still a five-year-old who won’t pick up his toys. “I think you’re burned out on this, Mick. Why don’t you take the rest of the day off?”

“I’m not burned out, Shar! I’m just…realistic.”

Her mouth twitched. It does that only when she’s mad or worried. And I knew for sure she wasn’t worried. “All right, I’ll take the rest of the day off!” I got up and stomped out of there-fast.

Lottie said, “Give it a rest, Mick. Stop fretting about the case and enjoy the afternoon.” She motioned at the kids. “You ever do that?”

“Play in the sand? Who doesn’t? We used to have contests to see who could build the best castle.”

“Who won?”

“Me, of course.”

“Of course.” She poked me in the ribs. I put my arm around her for self-protection, and we kept on watching the kids. They sure were enterprising. The boy finished his castle, marked out a subdivision, and started building another. The girl saw what he was up to, left her castle, and laid a sandy cornerstone.

“Hey,” the boy said to her, “you can’t have two castles!”

“You’ve got two.”

“That’s different. I’m a boy and you’re a girl. And girls don’t got any money.”

Lottie muttered, “A sexist, already!”

The little girl gave her brother a snotty look-the kind I’ve seen plenty of times, from all four of my sisters. “You think I don’t have money,” she told him. “I’ve to lots of stuff you don’t know about.” That was when he grabbed her bucket and dumped sand over her head, and she screamed, and the daddy jumped up and clobbered both of them.

And that was when something I hadn’t thought of before occurred to me, and I jumped up from the log, then pulled Lottie to her feet. “Hey, let’s go home.”

“Now? Why?”

“I want to play with my laptop.”

It was getting dark by the time we got to my condo on the Embarcadero, not far from McCone Investigations’ offices. I went straight to my computer, not even bothering to take off my jacket, and Lottie joined me. By then, she’d figured out a few things too. “You doing a real estate data search?” she asked.

I nodded without looking up from the computer keyboard.

“Search by owner’s name? San Francisco County?”

“Uh-huh.”

She sat down of the couch and waited while data scrolled in front of me on the monitor. Within a few minutes I had the information: Parcel 19 140-50. Owner: Harry Homestead. I turned and smile at Lottie.

“Mick,” she drawled, ‘you’re grinnin’ like a jackass eatin’ sweetbrier!”

“Well come and look where this property’s located.”

She scanned the screen. “Ingleside district. Isn’t that the area of nice houses that drug dealers’ve take over? Where the property values aren’t worth squat anymore because of the crime factor?”

“Yep.”

“So why would Homestead buy property there when he’s got a perfectly good mansion down the Peninsula?”

“I can think of one reason.”

Her eyes met mine, and then she shook her head. “You didn’t read carefully, Mick. Homestead bought that property three years after his wife disappeared.”

I looked where she was pointing. Damn!

“Wonder who owned the place before he bought it?” she said.

“This database doesn’t show.”

“County registrar of deeds is online.”

My Lottie thinks faster on her feet than I do.

“Wolfgang Trujillo. What kind of a name is that?”

Lottie smiled. “One that’s easy to trace. How many Wolfgang Trujillo’s can there be in San Francisco?”

“If he still lives here.”

“Try Information.” She handed me the phone I got a number and called. No answer.

“Okay, Trujillo’s not home, but I left a message on his machine. I’ll try him again after I take a look at that Ingleside district address.”

Lottie was already putting on her jacket. I went over and hugged her. “Sorry for ruining the afternoon and evening.”

“I don’t consider them ruined, not when we’re nipping at the heels of a wife-killer.”

“We?” I stepped back.

“Yeah, we. You’re not keeping me out of this one. Besides, you might need me.” She patted her oversized purse.

Yeah, I might. Lottie’s firearm-qualified and has a carry permit for her.357 Magnum. I can’t shoot straight to save my life. Plus she’s better at interviewing witnesses than I am; come to think of it, she’s my equal or better at almost anything we do. Which is what makes the relationship interesting.

It was already the dangerous hour by the time we got to Harry Homestead’s street on the other side of the city.

Three of those big old boats of cars that drug dealers seem to favor were parked in front of the house with a weedy front yard in the middle of the block. Guys who looked straight out of the Thugs “R” Us catalog lounged around on them, smoking and swapping lies while they waited for their clientele. Most of the houses were big two-story stucco places, set back from the sidewalk on a little grassy rise. They must’ve been nice once, but now they had bars on their windows and FOR SALE signs on their lawns.

A couple of the dealers glanced at Lottie and me as we drove in, but the Yamaha and our leathers were what Shar called “protective coloration.” Meaning that we looked like we belonged, so they didn’t try to mess with us. A good thing, too, because the odds would’ve been with Lottie and her Magnum.

Harry’s house was sunk way back behind a clump of yew trees. I pulled the bike up the drive and under them, and shut it down. Then we sat astride it, looking at the house. It was tall and narrow, cream stucco with dark timbers and leaded glass windows covered with heavy iron mesh. The light from the moon glinted off the glass, but otherwise it was dark.

“Nobody home,” I whispered, “except maybe a ghost.”

Lottie didn’t answer. She was fumbling around in her purse. “Wait here,” she whispered, and got off the bike.

“Where’re you-” but she’d already disappeared into the yews. Dammit, what was she doing? This was my case. I should be calling the shots.

A few seconds later I spotted her slipping up the steps to the entry, flashlight in hand. She disappeared through an archway, and I saw the beam swing around, stop, swing some more. Then she came off the steps at a trot and hurried back to me. “House is protected by Bay Alarm. We don’t want to mess with it,” she said.

“I wasn’t planning to break and enter.” I probably sounded as pissed off as I felt.

“The hell you weren’t!” she slid onto the seat behind me.

“Well, maybe I would, if it was an easy in-and-out. If we’re right about this place, Harry hasn’t been near it for years.”

“There’s still the problem of the timing. He bought it long after the missus disappeared.”

“Maybe Wolfgang Trujillo can shed some light on that.” I took out my cell phone and punched out his number.

Wolfgang Trujillo lived in a residential hotel on Nob Hill, close to downtown and the theater district. His living room was so full of books and magazines and playbills and newspaper clippings that there was only one place to sit-an old armchair with busted springs. He offered the chair to Lottie, and she perched on its edge.

I leaned against the sill of a painted-shut window that stared smack at the wall of the next building, and watched Mr. Trujillo pace around the room. He must’ve been in his seventies, tall and skinny, with a sunken chest and a wild mop of white hair, and he liked to wave his arms around while he talked.

“Mr. Homestead bought the Ingleside house on the advice of my former tenant, James Chaffee,” he said in response to Lottie’s first question. “I never met Homestead. The transaction was handled through Coldwell Banker.”

“The house was rented to Mr. Chaffee for how long?”

“Three, three and a half years before Mr. Homestead bought it. My wife had died, and I wanted to be closer to downtown, but I’d had difficulty selling, so I let it out instead.”

“What can you tell me about Mr. Chaffee?”

“He was a good tenant, kept the house and yard up. He installed an alarm system and didn’t ask for reimbursement. He paid his rent on a six-month basis, with a cashier’s check drawn on Wells Fargo Bank.”

“I suppose you ran a credit check on him before he took possession?”

Mr. Trujillo stopped pacing and gave Lottie a stern, somewhat astonished look. “Young woman, are you familiar with that neighborhood?”

“Uh, sort of.”

“Then you must be aware of the problems involved in owning property there. A house is very difficult to rent when drug dealers are camping on the front lawn, intimidating everyone who comes and goes. Mr. Chaffee gave me a cash deposit as soon as he looked at the place. He returned within the hour with a bank check for the balance. Frankly, I wouldn’t have cared if he had the credit rating of Saint Anthony.”

“Huh?”

“Patron saint of paupers,” I explained. I was raised Catholic, although most of it didn’t take.

“Oh.”

Lottie seemed thrown off her stride, so I questioned Mr. Trujillo. “Can you describe James Chaffee?”

“Certainly. He was around forty. Five-foot ten or thereabouts, slender build. He had blond hair that looked like a toupee, or maybe a wig. Very regular features.”

“Anything else? Facial hair? Distinguishing marks? So far, the description could’ve fit a lot of people.

Mr. Trujillo thought, staring up at the ceiling. “There was…Yes! He had a mole on his right earlobe. Quite a large one. I couldn’t help but stare at it, and that seemed to make him uncomfortable.”

As Lottie and I exchanged looks, the phone rang. Mr. Trujillo went to dig it out from behind a mound of clippings on the desk. He spoke with his back to us, then held out the receiver to me. “It’s your employer, Ms. McCone.”

How the hell had Shar known to call here? “So you’re one step ahead of me,” she said when I picked up.

“You found out about the house in Ingleside, and Mr. Trujillo?”

“Uh-huh. After you left I decided to run another background check on Homestead, in case the police missed something.”

“Were you messing around with my computer?” Shar’s only now becoming computer literate, and she doesn’t really know what she’s doing. Besides, nobody but me touches my office computer or laptop.

“It’s the agency’s machine, Mick.”

And that was that. She wasn’t going to tell me how she came up with the information. Sometimes I think the only reason she resists technology is to bother me.

I decided to one-up her. “Well, Lottie and I have found out that at the time his wife disappeared, Homestead was renting the Ingleside house under an assumed name. Here’s what I think happened: Old Harry had arranged to meet Susan someplace other than the Saint Francis that day. After all, we’ve only got his word about their lunch date. She thought he was gonna take her to meet his mother, who was living in what she called horrible circumstances.”

“In a house held siege by drug dealers.”

“Right. He took Susan there, whacked her, hid the body-maybe in a freezer. Then he activated the alarm system he’d had installed and went to the Saint Francis, where he made sure the staff saw him. And then he put on his act for the people he called and the cops.”

“So the body’s been in the house for all seven years?”

“Protected by the alarm system. For added insurance, Harry bought the place after enough time had gone by that the cops had back-burnered Susan’s disappearance. If he’s visited since, he’s been real careful.”

Shar didn’t say anything. Sometimes those silences of hers unnerve me. “So do we go to the cops with this?” I asked.

“I think you’re right about what happened,” she said, “but it’ll appear an iffy scenario at best to the police. And there’d be nothing they could do. No judge would issue a search warrant without probable cause. We’ll have to see if we can get Homestead to visit the house again-in front of the right witness.”

Shar spent the next morning in conference with Susan Cross’s attorney, an inspector from the SFPD homicide detail, and a representative of Bay Alarm; I spent the afternoon at the florist’s.

Not just any florist, mind you, but Sylvester Piazza, arranger to the glitterati. His fancy shop on Post Street was chock-full of flowers and plants that I’d never seen before, and every customer who came in dropped more bucks than I spend on rent each month. Sylvester himself was a hoot, as Lottie would say: a tubby little guy with thinning blow-dried hair. He scurried around his workroom in his black velvet jumpsuit, plucking a blossom from here, a piece of greenery from there, and mumbling about what an honor it was to be asked to replicate Susan Cross’s masterpiece. La cross-he actually called her that-had been a divine floral “artiste.”

I sat on a stool and watched as he consulted the color photo of Susan’s prize-winning arrangement that her lawyer had given us, and wondered why I’m always the one who gets the weird assignments at McCone Investigations. Sylvester arranged happily, humming opera and occasionally bursting into song. Finally he stepped back and eyeballed his work, nodded, and announced, “Now for the piece de resistance!” He went to one of his glass cases and rustled through the flowers stored there. Suddenly he stopped, clutched his heart, and let out a strangled howl.

I was off the stool right away, thinking he was having some sort of attack. As he doubled over, I rushed to steady him. “What’s wrong?”

“The Strelitzia!” he sobbed.

A fatal disease? Some body part gone out of whack? “Say what?”

“Bird of paradise! It’s the focal point of the arrangement, what gives it it’s meaning! And I have none! One of my dunderheaded assistants must have used it!”

“If that’s the problem, my dad has one of those plants that he brought back from Hawaii-”

“No, you imbecile, I’m talking about the giant bird of paradise! Strelitzia nicolai. The bananalike leaves, the purple floral envelope! Without it, this arrangement is nothing! Even if I could locate a proper plant, getting the cuttings here on time would be impossible.”

“Can’t you substitute-”

Sylvester’s face scrunched up and got red, and he shrieked, “Substitute?”

Right then Lottie breezed in. “Shar sent me to-what’s his problem?”

“No Strelitzia. I’ll let him explain.” I went outside and took a walk over to Union Square. The most zoned-out homeless guy there looked normal after old Sylvester.

When I got back to the florist’s shop, Lottie was on the phone, and Sylvester lay on the floor doing deep-breathing exercises. “Bird of paradise,” Lottie was saying. “No, the giant variety…You don’t? Well, thanks anyways.” She hung up and gave me the evil eye. “While you’ve been out I’ve called thirty-three florists. Seems the giant bird of paradise is in short supply.”

“So use something else.”

Sylvester moaned dramatically. Lottie rolled her eyes. “He says the arrangement won’t look right, and that’ll ruin the effect.” She consulted a list, picked up the receiver again and punched in a number.

Till then I’d never realized how much like Shar she is. Single-minded and stubborn in the extreme. I watched as she went through the whole list without turning up any giant Strelitzia. Then she grabbed one of Sylvester’s reference books and stuck her nose into it. “There’s got to be something,” she muttered.

You’d think she’d give up. Wouldn’t you?

At around ten that night I was once again hunkered down in shrubbery-this time in the yew trees at the Ingleside house, with Shar on one side of me and Lottie on the other. The guy from Bay Alarm had already called Harry Homestead to tell him about a malfunction in the security system and the huge floral arrangement sitting on the front porch. Now he was waiting on the walk for Harry to arrive. And not far away, in deepest shadow, lurked a couple of San Francisco’s finest.

“You really think this’ll work?” I whispered.

“Yes,” Shar and Lottie said in unison.

I looked from one to the other. Their expressions were so fierce that I was reminded of a horror movie where these harpies ripped a poor helpless male to shreds.

A few minutes more and a car turned into the driveway. Its headlights moved over the yew trees, and even though we were well hidden, I ducked my head. The car door slammed, footsteps tapped on the concrete, and a figure in a trench coat hurried up the walk to the security guy. From my past surveillance, I recognized old Harry.

“What’s going on here?” he demanded.

The security man said something I couldn’t hear, turned on his flashlight, and shone it up the steps at the porch where the flowers were.

Homestead went stiff. He took a step toward the house, stopped and said, “How long has that been here?”

“It was here when I checked the place around nine. The malfunction came up on our command center screens at eight-fifteen.”

Homestead was still staring at the floral arrangement. “You sure it wasn’t a break-in?”

“Well, we can’t be a hundred percent certain, but there’s no evidence of tampering. All the same, if you’ll give me your keys, I’ll check around inside-”

“No! I mean, don’t got to the trouble. I’ll take it from here.”

“It’s no trouble-”

“Just go. Please.” The security guy shrugged and went down the driveway to his car.

Harry stayed where he was, staring at the dark porch. Finally he squared his shoulders and started up there. At the top of the steps he took out what I guessed was a Bic and flicked it. The flame flared, wavered and went out as he dropped the lighter. And Harry let out a sound that made the hair on the back of my neck standup. “Got him!” Lottie whispered.

Next I heard Harry fumbling with the lock. The door opened and banged back against the inside wall. Light came on overhead, and Harry pushed the flower arrangement aside and stumbled down the hallway. Other lights flashed on. Progressing from the front to the back of the house. Lottie murmured, “I’d say he’s as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rockers.”

A few seconds later the cops who had been watching nearby stepped out of the shadows and flashed us thumbs-up sign. Hands on their holstered guns, they climbed the steps to investigate whoever it was who’d entered a long-unoccupied house in one of the city’s most crime-ridden areas.

Shar stood up and brushed a piece of yew tree out of her hair. “The flowers really spooked him! Sylvester Piazza must’ve done one hell of a job.”

“Actually, the arrangement doesn’t exactly match Susan Cross’s original.” Lottie said.

“Oh?” Shar’s eyes were on the house.

“Yeah. Sylvester couldn’t come get any giant bird of paradise, so I came up with the idea of substituting something even more effective. Sansevierta.”

“What’s that?”

Lottie grinned wickedly. “Something that’s highly appropriate, given that Harry lured his wife here on the pretext that she was to meet his mother. The common name for Sansevierta is mother-in-law’s tongue.”

Shar started to laugh, and she was still laughing when the cops dragged a handcuffed Harry from the garage. They’d found him checking the freezer to make use Susan Cross hadn’t risen from the dead to create one last flower arrangement.