Vixen

2

From Bryant Street I drove to the agency offices in South Park. It was almost five by then, but Tamara, a workaholic like Jake Runyon was and I used to be, would probably stay until seven or so. Unless she had a date tonight. She’d taken up again with her old boyfriend, Horace Fields, who had moved back to the city from Philadelphia after losing both his cellist’s chair with the philharmonic there and the wife he’d dumped Tamara for. The reconciliation was a mistake, as far as I was concerned-she didn’t seem as happy as she should have been if it was working out well-but she hadn’t asked for my opinion and I hadn’t offered it. The Dear Abby syndrome is not one of my shortcomings.

I gave her a capsule report on the interview, then put the notes I’d made in order and gave them to her to transcribe into a casefile. Tamara does most of the agency’s computer work-I’ve learned to operate one of the things, but with limited skills and a certain reluctance-and she is about as expert as they come. She also coordinates the various investigations, handles the billing and financial matters. Tamara Corbin, twenty-eight-year-old desk jockey dynamo who had tripled our business since I’d made the wise, very wise, decision to make her a full partner.

She set to work on the preliminaries. Skip-traces are an essential part of the agency’s business, along with insurance-related investigations and employee and personal background checks, and most can be dealt with by relying on the various real-time and other search engines we subscribe to. The Beckett case didn’t seem to be one of those because of the circumstances and particulars, but you never know what might turn up on an Internet search.

She suggested I hang around while she ran the initial checks-she’s fast as well as expert-and I did that. Kerry wouldn’t be home much before seven and Emily would get dinner started; singing was her primary passion, but she also loved to cook. Very good at both, too.

I was in my office, going over the file on a new, and routine, employee background check, when Tamara came in through the open connecting door carrying a printout in one purple-nailed hand. The purple polish didn’t go very well with her dark brown skin, or at least I didn’t think it did, but I wouldn’t say anything to her about that, either. Who was I to criticize the fashion trends of a woman young enough to be my granddaughter?

“Nothing much on Kenneth Beckett,” she said. “No record prior to the grand theft charge, just a couple of minor moving violations and a bunch of parking tickets, most of them in the L.A. area. Worked at two yacht harbors down there, Marina del Rey and Newport Beach. Good employment records in both places, left both jobs voluntarily for unspecified reasons. Worked on Andrew Vorhees’ yacht for six months before his arrest-no problems there, either. Parents both dead, no family except for the sister. No traceable contacts with anybody else down south or up here.”

“Pretty much confirms what Cory Beckett told me about him.”

“Yeah. But I’ll bet she didn’t tell you anything about her background.” Tamara waggled an eyebrow. “Juicy stuff.”

“What, you checking up on our clients now?”

“After that fiasco with Verity Daniels, you bet I am.”

The Daniels tangle was a sore subject with me, too. It had landed Jake Runyon in jail on a bogus attempted rape charge, almost gotten the agency sued for malfeasance, and its finish was the source of my promise to Kerry to keep myself out of harm’s way.

“Besides,” Tamara went on, “her background and her brother’s are pretty closely linked. Kenny may be a nerd, but she’s anything but. Some real interesting facts here.”

“Such as?”

“For one, she’s not a model. Not now, not ever.”

“No? Then what does she do for a living?”

“Marries rich dudes. Two of ’em so far.”

Well, that wasn’t much of a surprise. “Married now? She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.”

“Nope. First husband divorced her after eight months. She got enough of a settlement to set her up real sweet for a while. Number two, rich dude named Lassiter, lasted a little over a year. No divorce there, though.”

“No?”

“Guy offed himself.”

“For what reason?”

“Financial setbacks, according to the note he left,” Tamara said. “But there’s more to it than that. Two grown sons from a previous marriage claimed Cory was responsible for Lassiter’s suicide.”

“On what grounds?”

“Several. Two substantiated affairs during the year of marriage. Quote, bizarre sexual practices detrimental to his mental health, unquote.”

“Bizarre in what way?”

“Not a matter of public record. Could be anything from orgies to goats to whips and chains.”

“Goats?”

Tamara chuckled. One of her less-than-endearing traits is an off-the-wall sense of humor that she sometimes uses to shock my old-fashioned sensibilities. “Sons also claimed she mishandled finances, and coerced their father into making a new will that cut them out of the estate and left everything to her. They sued and had enough legal chops to get a favorable ruling. They got the big slice, she got a little one. Case brought her some negative publicity-probably one of the reasons she moved up here.”

“So she’s a promiscuous gold digger. What does that have to do with her missing brother?”

“Nothing, maybe. Except that both her exes owned yachts berthed at local marinas, the first one in Marina del Rey, the second in Newport Beach-the same places Kenny worked.”

I chewed on that for a bit. “So maybe it was the husbands who got him his jobs there.”

“Uh-uh. He was working at both marinas before she hooked up with either guy.”

“Well? Maybe she likes boats, too, hangs around where her brother works, and that’s how she met the future husbands.”

“Or Kenny set up the meetings for her.”

“What’re you suggesting? The two of them working a scam to find her eligible marriage partners?”

“Could be. He trolls around, finds a likely prospect, baits the hook, and she does the rest.”

“Immoral, if so, but not illegal.”

“No, but if that’s the game, neither one of ’em’s as innocent as she pretended to you.”

“Clients have lied to us before,” I said. “We don’t have to like them or believe them as long as the lies have no bearing on the job we’re hired to do. You know that. Besides, Abe Melikian’s footing half the bill, and we know he’s all right.”

Tamara said cynically, “Good thing for him he’s not a rich yachtsman,” and retreated into her office.

Since the Beckett case was essentially mine, I was back at the agency again the next morning for the follow-through. Tamara had compiled a list of all the yacht harbors and marinas in the greater Bay Area-quite a few, large and small, within a seventy-five-mile radius-and she and I called the ones large enough to have full-time staff members who could check their records for recent hires. No Kenneth Beckett or anyone answering his description at any of them. Finding him wasn’t going to be that easy. If he was working at all, it could be for a private party rather than as an employee of a marina, boatyard, or boat owner. Or at a marina or boatyard outside the seventy-five-mile radius. And in any event, he might well be using a name other than his own. It would take legwork, possibly a lot of it, to track him down.

In the old days I handled most of the field jobs myself, until it got to be too much effort for even a fairly robust man in his sixties. Now and then I make an exception and climb back into the field harness, but hunting for Kenneth Beckett wouldn’t be one of those times. Likely the search would require piling up a considerable number of highway miles, showing Beckett’s photograph and asking the same questions over and over again-pretty dull and time-consuming work.

Not for Jake Runyon, though. He thrived on that kind of assignment. Liked being out on the road, moving from place to place. Worked best when he could set his own schedule, his own pace. And there was enough gap time in his caseload to allow him to take on the Beckett hunt.

Good man, Jake, a former Seattle cop and former investigator for one of the larger private agencies in the Pacific Northwest. Big, slab-faced, hammer-jawed. Smart, tough, loyal, and honest as they come. He’d moved to San Francisco after the cancer death of his second wife, to try to reestablish a bond with an estranged gay son from his first marriage, the only family he had left. The restoration attempt hadn’t worked out; he and Joshua were still estranged and would likely remain so.

Runyon had been something of a reticent loner, still grieving for his dead wife, the first year or so he was with us. He’d come out of his shell somewhat after his hookup with Bryn Darby, but now that the relationship might be ending, he’d begun to drift back into his loner mode. A hard man to get close to in any case. My connection with him was mainly professional; we didn’t socialize, probably never would. But we got along well, and more importantly, we had each other’s backs. I’d trust him in any crisis and with my life-had done both, in fact, on more than one occasion.

Tamara and I were just finishing up when Runyon stopped in to deliver some material he’d dug up on a consumer fraud case. We briefed him on the Beckett investigation, and after he’d looked over the casefile he asked, “Priority job?”

“Medium to start,” I said. “Beckett’s trial is three weeks off, but it might take a while to find him.”

“Okay. I’ll get moving on it right away.”