The Boys from Santa Cruz

4

Infantile Paralysis, the gift that keeps on giving, thought Skip, washing down two more Norco tablets with the dregs of his third cup of coffee. Polio was a rotten enough deal; post-polio syndrome, with a median onset of over thirty years after the initial course of the disease, felt a little like piling on to Skip.

Still, all things considered, he’d gotten off relatively lightly, and he knew it. Having a withered left leg inches shorter than the right and fused at the ankle for good measure may not have been a picnic, but it beat the crap out of dying in an iron lung, like some of the kids he’d known in the hospital. And he couldn’t blame PPS for the damage his bobbing, skipping gait had done to his hips and spine-it was his own child-self’s fault for insisting on wearing Keds or PF Flyers like the other kids, instead of the built-up shoe his orthopedist had prescribed.

While waiting for the pain pills to kick in, Skip worked the Brobauer case in his mind. No ransom demands had been received yet-Warren or Lillian would have been notified. But if money wasn’t the motive, what was? Ellis Brobauer had no known surviving enemies, and there’d been no family squabbles or romantic/sexual entanglements that Warren or Lillian were aware of-or would admit to, anyway. Nor had there been any work-related problems. According to Warren, except for a little rainmaking and a little estate work for his oldest clients, Ellis Brobauer had more or less retired from the law firm that bore his name.

But along with that coveted corner office, Judge Brobauer had retained the services of his secretary, the unforgettably named Doris Dragon. If the old man had been involved in some risky business that had led to his kidnapping and/or murder, Ms. Dragon, who’d been with him since the Ford administration, might know something about it.

It was worth a shot, anyway. Skip hauled the phone book down from the shelf and found a listing for Dragon, D., at 1000 Mason Street, which he guessed would be somewhere up on Nob Hill. She recognized his name-“Leon’s boy, of course”-and agreed to meet with him, although she doubted she could be of much help.

It took Skip five minutes to get to the car, ten minutes to reach Nob Hill, and another ten for a handicapped parking space to open up across the street from 1000 Mason, which turned out to be the grand old wedding cake of an apartment house known as the Brocklebank, where James Stewart had stalked Kim Novak in Vertigo.

Ms. Dragon met Skip at the door of her seventh-floor apartment dressed in a fitted pantsuit of cobalt blue accessorized with a turquoise scarf. With her apricot-colored hair teased up into a hollow-looking pouf and her eyelids red beneath a hasty application of mascara, she might have been Margaret Thatcher’s slightly slutty older sister.

“I’ve been wracking my brain all morning,” she told Skip as she led him down a dark hallway to a living room cluttered with enough Oriental rugs, hangings, furniture, and tchotchkes to stock a good-size antiques store. “But I honestly can’t think of any reason anyone would want to harm Judge Brobauer.”

“Has he been working on any contentious cases lately?”

“As far as I’m aware, the only case he’s involved in directly is an estate matter. An elderly couple had been planning to leave everything in a trust for their grandson, who’s been institutionalized for several years. They had to rewrite their wills after the boy was killed in that terrible fire last month-surely you must have seen it in the news?”

But Skip had spent the last two weeks of April vacationing on Maui with his on-again, off-again lady friend-no newspapers, no television.

“It was a place called Meadows Road? North of Santa Cruz?”

Meadows Road! Meadows fucking Road. “Excuse me, Ms. Dragon? This grandson-was that Luke Sweet, by any chance?”

“It was. His grandparents were Fred and Evelyn Harris. They’d been clients of Mr. Brobauer for thirty years. When he told me they’d been murdered last week, you could have knocked me over with a feather.”

“I know what you mean,” Skip murmured.

“But I can’t see how that would have anything to do with his abduction-it wasn’t as if the wills were being contested. I believe most of the estate is going to be divided up among charities, now that the grandson is deceased.”

But Skip’s thoughts were already tending in the same direction as those of a certain overweight FBI agent in Quantico, Virginia, 2,843 miles to the east. “Excuse me, Ms. Dragon. Do you happen to know whether the authorities are absolutely sure Luke Sweet is dead?”

“I certainly hope so,” she replied. “As I recall, the young man was a rather nasty piece of work.”