Treasure Hunt

12

At ten after six, Hunt walked into the homicide detail and over to Juhle’s desk. The inspector looked up and Hunt opened a leather folder and extracted several sheets of paper.

Juhle didn’t exude joy at the interruption. “What’s this?” he asked.

“Eleven reports. One guy didn’t give his name or address, but we included a summary of his statement. Nine people gave statements, eight to Tamara over the phone. They’re in order from least obviously crazy to most crazy. One lady wouldn’t talk on the phone, so I sent Mickey out to talk to her. She saw Como fall out of a blimp. And I had a chat with Mrs. Como, who mentioned a couple of things she forgot to tell you when you interviewed her. Don’t look at me like that-I’m just the messenger. That’s ten in two hours, Dev, plus Mrs. Como.” Hunt paused. “It’s something,” he said.

Juhle raised his eyes. “Tell me about the blimp lady.”

At a quarter to seven, Hunt and Juhle had baseball gloves on (Hunt owned several) and were playing hardball catch, soft-tossing, alongside the basketball court in Hunt’s warehouse, both of them dressed in street clothes.

“What pisses me off,” Juhle was saying, “is people telling you stuff that they didn’t tell me and Russo when we talked to them. What’d they think we were doing, just dicking around?”

Hunt caught Juhle’s toss and threw it back. “People don’t trust cops. Either that or they’re scared of ’em.”

“Me and Russo? She looks about fifteen and scares no one, trust me. And I can’t even scare my own kids.”

“It’s what you represent. You’re involved with the cops, everybody knows that basically you’re in some kind of trouble. You talk to me or Mickey, or even Tam, it’s just a conversation. Besides, you didn’t want to talk to the blimp lady. We saved you from that.”

“I’m grateful. You guys are my heroes.”

Juhle threw. Hunt caught.

Hunt threw. Juhle caught.

Juhle said, “Ellen Como. We talked to Ellen Como for like an hour, maybe more. She told us basically nothing helpful, and she gives you the store.”

“She got the feeling you thought she was a suspect.”

“Well, she wasn’t all wrong there. She is a suspect. Note the clever use of the present tense. What’d she think? She doesn’t call to report her missing husband for a whole day? She lives two blocks from where they find his body? He got left off outside their house? No, no, it can’t be her. What can we be thinking?” He unleashed a fastball.

“Hey! You’re gonna throw the arm out again. Easy.” Hunt demonstrated, a nice soft sixty- foot toss. “So anyway,” he concluded, “Ellen’s pretty sure it’s her. Alicia.”

“She said he fired her on that day?”

“The very one.”

“Well, the girl said there wasn’t anything physical between them.”

Hunt caught the next throw and shrugged. “Maybe there wasn’t.”

“I’ve seen her, if you remember. I’d bet there was. But even if there was, so what? That doesn’t mean she killed him. And you realize that Ellen could have just been trying to deflect the investigation away from herself?”

“You’re kidding,” Hunt said. “I never would have thought of that.”

“Yeah, well. The thing is, they both had a reason, and she’s the spouse, so she gets top billing until we find some evidence leading someplace else.”

“And on that front…?”

Juhle shook his head no. “Somebody must have dragged him to the lake, or even went in with him and got him tucked under the trees, but there’s no sign of struggle on any of the banks. We’ve just got the body with the bump on the head.”

Hunt threw. “What caused the bump? Any idea?”

“ME says no pattern injury. No definite shape or weight to the weapon. Other than that, something hard. A rock, a piece of lumber. Hell, a baseball bat, an anchor, a sap, a gun? Who knows? Maybe somebody will call you and give you a hint, and then you can tell us. Did I mention that this pisses me off?”

“I think so.”

“You dangle three hundred grand out there-and by the way, that’s obscene in its own right-and suddenly you’ve got witnesses, you got people just dying to be good citizens. You think any one of ’em might just think to pick up the phone and tell what they think they know to the police? You think that maybe could happen just once?”

“You want the truth?”

“Always.”

Hunt caught Juhle’s toss and kept the ball in his mitt, signifying the end of the catch. “I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

Hunt met his girlfriend, Gina Roake, for a late dinner at Sam’s Grill. Sam’s was a hopping power room during the lunch hour, but settled into a more intimate groove as the evening wore on. Now, closing in on nine o’clock, Roake and Hunt sat in one of the booths back by the kitchen. Their waiter had pulled the curtain on them after he’d left their dinners, and there might as well have been no one else in the restaurant.

Roake was older than Hunt, closing in on fifty, but as an inveterate exerciser and outdoors person, she was in excellent shape. After twenty-five years in the practice of law, she’d just recently had her first legal thriller, Brief Deception, accepted for publication, and she was thinking about her next one.

Most of the dinner, they’d talked about what that one might be about, and of course the marketing for the first one. Would they want her to go on tour? What about her law practice when she was out of town? Should she spend her own money on advertising? Did she want to use the same character in the second book, or break in an entirely new one? Maybe she should go to nonfiction, write up one of the real cases she’d seen or worked on? God knows, there had been some good ones. Did she have a big enough theme? Did it have to be a murder case?

Hunt nodded. “Got to be murder.”

“They’re always murders, though. All these books.”

“Right. You know why? Any violent crime that’s not a murder has a living victim. And the victim can tell you what happened. You could write a book, but it would probably be pretty short, and it wouldn’t be much of a mystery.”

She smiled.

“Besides, people don’t care so much about bicycle theft, or other lesser crimes. Except maybe rape, now that I think of it. You could probably do a rape case, but you’d have to kill people in it eventually anyway. And if you’re going to be knocking people off, might as well make it a murder case to begin with.”

“Maybe you’re right.” She put her fork down, reached across the small table, and took his hand. “Have I been monopolizing the conversation?”

“Very charmingly.”

“But that means yes. I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about. It’s all been interesting.”

“And yet, in spite of that”-she broke a smile-“you seem slightly distracted.”

“Maybe a little,” he said.

“Maybe a little,” she repeated. Then, “What?”

“Actually, it’s been a hell of a day.”

“Good? Bad? I was thinking bad, and didn’t want to ask. You’d get to it.”

“Well, in fact, in a remarkable and unexpected change of pace, it’s been nothing but good. Pretty amazingly good, in fact.” He ran down the events for her, from Tamara’s appearance in the office this morning, to Mickey’s idea and the miraculously ever-growing reward, the reprieve on his business, short-term at least. Ending it with Ellen Como and the tragicomic relief of Virginia, now and forever to be known as the Blimp Lady. The victim’s fall from the sky into the lagoon, “which,” he concluded, “we’ve pretty much discounted as improbable.”

“Good decision.” Gina shook her head in gentle amusement. “This town.” But after another minute, her expression grew serious. “So in effect you’re investigating this murder?”

“Not exactly. Passing what we find, if anything, along to Juhle, is all.”

“He’s talking to you again? I’m glad to hear that.”

“Me too.”

“I felt a little guilty, I still feel a little guilty, about driving you guys apart. Does he know you’re still seeing me?”

“I assume so. He’s a cop. He knows everything. But that doesn’t matter. It wasn’t you and him. It was me and him. Although he’s not too thrilled that people seem to be coming to me now and not him.”

“Is he offering them money too?”

“That’s what I told him. It wasn’t much consolation.”

Gina sipped wine, put her glass down, something obviously still on her mind.

“I can hear the gears turning from over here,” Hunt said.

A fragile smile. “I just worry about you getting in the face of these murder suspects. That’s not exactly the same thing as surveillance, or rounding up witnesses, or subpoena service.”

Hunt downplayed it. “I’m not really getting in anybody’s face, Gina. Just passing along information.”

“Didn’t you just tell me you went and saw Ellen Como?”

“Well…”

“And isn’t she a suspect? Isn’t she, in fact, like, the prime suspect even as we speak?”

Hunt couldn’t reply.

“All I’m saying,” Roake went on, “is that the thing about people who have actually murdered someone, there’s always some small chance they’ll feel the need to do it again.”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

“Most victims don’t, babe, that’s kind of the point. Until that last little ‘uh-oh, I should have seen this coming’ moment. After which, ‘Oh, well, too late now.’ ” She picked up a piece of sourdough, looked at it, put it back down. “I don’t mean to sound paranoid, Wyatt, and maybe I wouldn’t if all this wasn’t around Dominic Como, but since it is…”

“Since it is, what?”

Stalling, Gina moved a few more items around-twirled her wineglass, adjusted the placement of her knife. Finally, she raised her eyes. “I really don’t want to slander the dead, especially a dead well-respected and apparently well-loved community leader, but let’s just say you don’t get to be a power broker in this town on Como’s level if you don’t have a whole lot more going on than meets the eye.”

“Like what, specifically?”

“I can’t give you specifics. I don’t know any. Which is how he wanted it. All I can tell you is that things just happened because Dominic Como laid his hands upon them. Or didn’t happen if he didn’t. Do you know Len Turner?”

This got all of Hunt’s attention. “I do. He’s handling the reward. What about him?”

“He’s handling the reward? That’s perfect. What about him is that, cutting to the chase, he’s ruthless and unethical, as well as all but invisible to the general public. He’s also counsel, or was, to Como and several other of our most successful service- oriented nonprofits. Some have been known to call him consigliere. Want to hear a story?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. Twenty years ago, Len Turner’s a young attorney with Dewey, Cheatham and Howe-not their real name…”

“I got it,” Hunt said.

“I thought you would. Anyway, Turner’s got a client who owns this tiny little four-acre parcel of land down by China Basin that would be worth about a zillion dollars except for the slight problem that back in World War Two and through the fifties it was a U.S. Navy munitions and fuel storage facility, which means that now it’s essentially a toxic waste dump down to about a hundred feet. But now there’s starting to be talk that the Giants are going to move to China Basin, which, as you’ve noticed, they have, and the whole area’s going to be a redevelopment gold mine. You with me so far?”

Hunt nodded. “Sí.”

“Okay, so Turner gets hired to change the zoning and get it approved by the Board of Supervisors. This turns out to be not as difficult as you might think, because Turner’s clients had a lot of money to begin with. So he simply found experts and hired them to write fraudulent environmental impact reports. He then paid off one of the supervisors, Frank Addario, to support it and shepherd it through the board. But, and this is my favorite part, the best move he made was anticipating resistance from the Conservancy Club, which coincidentally had about forty-nine other questionable sites all over the state they were fighting to save. He bribed them-their president, actually-to the tune of a million dollars, to forget this one spot in what was already a severely polluted city environment. So what would it hurt?”

“So what happened?” Hunt asked.

“So the zoning got changed and everybody won. Except, of course, the city as soon as a buyer appeared and got about two months into the cleanup and discovered that the land essentially could never be used.”

“Didn’t they sue?”

“Sure. And they even won, in the sense that the sale got rescinded. But, and this is the truly great part, Turner and his clients then turned around and sued the city for approving the zoning change in the first place. They hadn’t done their due diligence, et cetera. And finally, the city settled with these cretins to the tune of like ten million dollars.”

“Can this guy Turner be my lawyer?” Hunt asked.

Gina gave him a sweet smile. “No, because I’m your lawyer. But you see what I mean? And the story isn’t over yet.”

“I’m listening.”

“Okay, before the settlement, while all the stink is going on over this deal and the lawsuit, needless to say all the supervisors who voted for the zoning change are taking a lot of heat. At about this time, Como enters the picture. Or this particular picture.”

Hunt cocked his head. “How do you know all this?”

Roake hit him with a level gaze. “Mostly David.” This was her former fiancé, David Freeman, who for forty or more years before he died had been one of the city’s legal titans. “He was counsel for the Conservancy Club.”

“Aha. Okay, back to Como.”

“Como sees an opportunity here, and starts pumping money that certain development interests had been donating to the Sunset Youth Project into the campaigns of the supervisors who are running to unseat the scoundrels who have helped perpetrate this fraud on the city.”

“That’s got to be illegal.”

“Oh, it’s illegal, all right. But illegal only matters if someone is going to pursue it criminally. And back then in the DA’s office, perhaps because the DA had a son who was having rehab issues himself, there didn’t seem to be the will.”

“This is getting good,” Hunt said.

“I thought you’d enjoy it. And so, to continue, guess what? A majority of new supervisors got elected. And those are the folks who, to avoid the cost and hassle of litigation, for the good of the city and to put this ugliness behind them, approved the settlement. In other words, it all just went away. Oh, and one other thing.”

“Hit me.”

“This was also when the city signed over the decrepit and abandoned former Ocean Park Elementary School to the Sunset Youth Project to use as their headquarters.”

“Wow,” Hunt said. “Nice ending.”

“You see why I think it might be smart of you to watch out and pay attention around this thing? It might have been Como’s wife, or something else personal, all right. But it might also have been something altogether different. In which case, there are interests you don’t want to get in the way of.”

“Well”-Hunt went back to his meal-“you made your point. But I still think there’s a big difference between these financial shenanigans and people actually killing other people over them.”

“You do, huh?”

“I do.”

“Well, then, I better not tell you about Addario and Ayers-the supervisor and the Conservancy Club president.”

“I bet you’re going to, though.”

She nodded. “Before the settlement got announced, Addario apparently committed suicide, and Ayers was apparently the victim of a hit-and-run.”

“I notice you said apparently twice in there.”

“Right.” Solemn, Gina nodded again. “Good word, isn’t it? Apparently is the new allegedly.”