Savages

18

TAMARA

Cold, fog-drippy morning. Past few days hadn’t been too bad, but now your standard San Francisco summer weather was back again. Well, all that gray matched her mood. Fallout from Vonda’s little bombshell last night. Just what she needed-something new to rock her world.

She was first at the agency, as usual. Turned up the heat to get rid of the damp chill, made a pot of coffee… damn glorified secretary. Booted up her Mac and checked e-mail until the coffee was ready. Since she’d lost the twenty pounds, she drank it black; this morning she dumped in two packets of dairy creamer and a teaspoonful of sugar. She’d hate herself for it later, but right now she didn’t care.

She sat sipping the sweetened coffee and staring at the blank computer screen. Why did she feel so down anyway? Vonda’d been her best friend since high school. Shared all kinds of confidences, even the gory details when each of them lost their viriginity. Two of a kind, weren’t they? Wild childs with chips on their shoulders, dissing Whitey, smoking dope, drinking wine, hanging and banging with the bad boys. Vowing they’d always be outlaws. None of the conventional crap for them. Husbands, families-forget it. Get gobbled up by Whitey’s world like her sister, Claudia-no way. Only trouble with that ’tude was, if you were smart and your old man was a cop and Vonda’s was a fireman and both of you grew up a long way from the ghetto and had never even tasted poverty, you couldn’t keep the chips from sliding off eventually. Things happened. You got older; you found out you had computer skills or an interest in interior design; you decided you might as well give college a try; you met somebody who was smart and talented and had never had a chip; you needed extra money so you drifted into jobs like this one or a sales position at the S.F. Design Center. And the next thing you knew, the hard edge was gone and you were an adult with adult responsibilities; you had career ambitions that were rooted smack in the middle of a world that maybe wasn’t so much Whitey’s anymore after all.

Tamara had always figured that if either of them was going to throw off her teenage rebellion and settle down to marriage and kids, it would be her. Her and Horace. Not Vonda. That girl liked men too much. Different men, as long as they were black. No home and hearth bullshit for her. How many times had Vonda said that over the years? But things kept happening on that front, too. Horace moving to Philly and taking up with Mary from Rochester, and Vonda meeting a suit who worked in a Financial District brokerage house, a suit who happened to be both white and Jewish, and falling in love with him like she’d fallen in love with fifty other guys she’d been to bed with except that this time, for some weird reason, it was the real thing. And then she shows up at the apartment last night, no warning, so excited she looks like she’s about to pop, and drops her bombshell.

Pregnant.

Getting married right away.

And the weird thing was, Tamara wasn’t sure which of the two tweaked her the most.

Didn’t have anything to do with Ben Sherman’s color or religion, though both were going to be a problem for Vonda. One of her brothers was a dead-bang racist; already been some friction, and he’d go ballistic when he found out. Vonda didn’t care about that, at least not right now, so why should she? No, what was bugging her was something more personal. She knew what it was. Might as well admit it to herself.

Jealous. Stupid, but there it was. Jealous on both counts.

Horace, the love of her life, gone for good. She didn’t have anybody now, not even a casual bed partner. And Vonda was not only getting married to the love of her life, so she claimed; she was also pleased and happy about the life growing inside her, the family she’d sworn she’d never have. Wanted that baby, all right, dirty diapers and 3:00 A.M. feedings and all the rest of it. Ought to be grateful it wasn’t her who was knocked up, but instead, here she was turning a couple of pale shades of green over a girlfriend who was facing all kinds of mixed-marriage wife and mother problems.

Why would she want to be saddled with a kid of her own at this stage, with her career on the rise and her time already at a premium? She didn’t, not really. And yet… she kept thinking about that scared little kidnapped girl, Lauren, and the way the two of them had bonded during the long hours they’d been held captive together five months ago. Brought out all sorts of maternal instincts she hadn’t even known she had. Made her pine a little then, and now and then since, for her own kid someday. She’d make a good mother, no question about that. Good wife, too. Well, she’d have a chance to find out someday, wouldn’t she? Probably. Sure. She was only twenty-six. Plenty of time.

Someday.

Angrily, the anger directed inward, she forced herself to get to work. Balm for everything, work. Frustration, yearning, sexual need, maternity, loneliness… just throw yourself into your job, let it take over your mind, and all of the bad got pushed far enough aside so you could forget it was there. For a while, anyway.

She was deep into the background search on Anthony Drax when Bill came in carrying a white gift box. He was in a good mood, at least. Looked like he’d had a good night’s sleep. Looked like the cancer scare was going to turn out all right, thank God. Kerry was a survivor and so was he; they had each other, that was how they’d been able to get through the strain and pain of the past three months. You could get through just about anything if you had somebody to hang on to, somebody who cared enough to be there for you…

And here we go again and the hell with that.

She put on a smiley face for him so he wouldn’t start asking personal questions. “How’d it go with Mathias yesterday?”

“He’s a piece of work, all right. Everything Celeste Ogden said he was.”

“You meet Dracula?”

“Unfortunately. Birds of a feather, the two of them.”

“Bats.”

“What?”

“Bats of a wing.”

Pretty feeble, but he chuckled anyway. Only lame thing about Bill was that he didn’t have much of a sense of humor and what he did have was conventional. Hers was off-the-wall; Horace had told her once that she ought to do stand-up. Yeah, well. You could put Bill on without half-trying. She’d done it so often and so wickedly on occasion that sometimes she felt ashamed afterward.

She listened while he recounted his interviews with Mathias and Drax and with Mathias’s neighbor and Philomena Ruiz. Interesting. Couple of things that needed to be checked out. First one was that silver sports car the neighbor woman had seen. As deep as Tamara had gone on both Mathias and Drax, it hadn’t seemed necessary to find out what kinds of cars they drove. Now it did, and never mind that Mathias had apparently been in Chicago the night his wife died.

Bill tapped the gift box, which he’d set down on her desk. “Nancy Mathias’s records,” he said. “I went through the receipts again last night. I didn’t make the connection before, but two of the paid bills came from a Dr. Robert J. Prince. Doesn’t say what his specialty is-he’s part of a Geary Street consortium called Medical Associates, Inc. Neurologist, probably. There’s also a bill for diagnostic tests at U.C. Med Center.”

“Check that out, too.”

“You might want to go through the records yourself. I don’t think Kerry and I missed anything, but you never know. I’d like to take a look at the last six months of her diary entries, same reason. Can you e-mail them to Kerry’s computer when you get the chance?”

“No problem.”

“You find out anything new on Mathias?”

“No. Man’s background is so clean it shines. Got to be some dirt somewhere-nobody’s that perfect-but he’s got himself covered every way there is.”

“How about Drax? You do him yet?”

“Working on him when you came in. Same thing so far. Graduate of Cal Poly with honors and a degree in computer science. Worked in Silicon Valley for ten years before he went to RingTech-two big E companies, moving on up the corporate ladder. Another success-at-any-cost type, probably unscrupulous as hell but nothing to prove it. No felony record, no misdeameanor record, no known underworld connections. Never been married. Been living with a Delta stewardess named Donna Lane in Atherton for the past six months.”

“He’s protective of Mathias,” Bill said. “Looks up to him, probably envies him. Considers him a genius, a Forbes list mover and shaker. I can see him doing just about anything Mathias asked of him if he were promised a piece of the action.”

“Like killing his wife.”

“But it still comes down to motive. Why would Mathias want his wife dead badly enough to recruit Drax for the dirty work? Drax or anybody else? That’s the sticking point.”

Tamara didn’t get back to work right away. After Bill retreated to his office, she went out and refilled her coffee cup and stood at the front windows for a couple of minutes, looking down at the empty South Park playground below. Her mood had shifted. Different perspective now, the self-critical kind.

You know what you are, girl? she thought. You’re a fool. One of those it’s-all-about-me fools.

Part of the mood shift had come from thinking about how putting Bill on made her feel ashamed sometimes. Wasn’t the only thing she had to be ashamed about. Mooning around, pity partying, because her best friend was pregant and getting married and she didn’t have a man of her own anymore and motherhood was a long way off. So Horace was gone and she didn’t have a love life right now, so what? She was still one lucky black woman, come right down to it. Look at all the brothers and sisters living in the projects and the ghettos in Visitacion Valley and Hunters Point and East Oakland, all the poverty, all the drugs, all the zoned-out gangbangers with automatic weapons, all the innocent people who died every day for no sane reason. She wasn’t caught in that trap, never would be. She had a job she loved, goals that could be reached. Lived pretty well right now and her future prospects were even better. Most important, she was in a position to help people in trouble, right some wrongs, see some justice done.

More she could do on that score, too-a lot more. Such as take on pro bono cases for African-Americans and Latinos and other ethnics in trouble who needed the agency’s services but couldn’t afford them.

It wasn’t an inspiration; she’d considered the idea before. Just hadn’t done anything about it because of how busy they were. Yeah, right. Lame excuse. You can find time for anything if you care about it enough. And she did care. Always had, always would.

All right. Talk to Bill about it, first opportunity. He’d be for it; man was color-blind and dripped milk of human kindness. Might mean hiring another investigator and an office manager, take some of the burden off the two of them and Jake and Alex Chavez. It’d cut their profit margin, but that didn’t matter. Doing something, making a difference-that mattered.

And meanwhile, no more playing the it’s-all-about-me game. She’d been a little short and unsympathetic with Vonda last night. Call her tonight, go see her, make it right. You weren’t good to your friends and family, didn’t keep them close, you really would end up alone-you’d die alone, sad and bitter and desperate, the way Nancy Mathias had.

Tamara went back to her desk feeling better.

The sports car lead took a while to track, because of the laws that prevented easy access to DMV records. Turned out Mathias had two cars registered in his name, a Lexus and a Lincoln Continental. Drax owned a Mercedes sedan. The woman Drax was living with? Something there, maybe: Donna Lane drove a three-year-old BMW Z3. Sports car, but the color wasn’t listed. She could find out, only it would take some time.

Dr. Robert J. Prince first. Figured to be a routine follow-up, but it wasn’t. When she found out his specialty, it surprised her enough to put in a phone call to the Medical Associates offices on Geary. Dr. Prince was “unavailable,” whatever that meant. She tried the need-to-know-for-insurance-purposes dodge with his nurse, but that didn’t get her anywhere. Under no circumstances, the nurse said crisply, did Dr. Prince give out information about his patients, alive or deceased.

She went across into Bill’s office. “Got something,” she said.

“The sports car?”

“Nancy Mathias. Her headaches weren’t simple migraines after all.”

“No?”

“Dr. Robert Prince isn’t a neurologist. He’s a specialist in intercranial disorders-a brain surgeon.”