Marcia Muller - Locked In

“Pier Twenty-four and a Half.”

“What happened to you?”

“This damn fuckin’ puta hit me on the head with a paperweight.”

The paramedic’s face disappeared, and Julia looked up at the fluorescent lights on the ceiling. The glare hurt her eyes, so she squeezed them shut.

“She seems okay,” the medic said, “but she should be hospitalized overnight. Head trauma can be tricky.”

“Right.” Craig.

Julia said, “I want to go home.”

“Follow the doctor’s orders.”

“He’s not a doctor.”

“He knows a hell of a lot more than you do.”

She sighed, gave in. Wasn’t worth fighting when she was so tired. In the ambulance she asked the attendant, “Where’re you taking me?”

“SF General.”

Well, at least she’d be close to Shar.

He wedged the Harley into a spot between two sports cars on Filbert Street in the upscale Cow Hollow neighborhood. The address Susan Angelo had listed on her application for employment was a two-story sugar cube of a building mid-block. A light shone in a small entry with two mailboxes and intercoms on its wall. He approached quietly and looked at the names on the boxes.

No Angelo or D’Angelo.

He rang the bell of the first-floor unit, but got no response. A woman’s voice replied on the intercom of the top unit; it wasn’t Susan’s. He asked for Diane D’Angelo, and the woman said she wasn’t there.

“But this is her place?”

“No. She gets mail sometimes, but she doesn’t live here.”

“May I come up and talk with you?”

“Why?”

“I’m a private investigator with the agency where Diane works. She may be in trouble.”

Silence.

“Look, I’ve got identification. I can slip it under your door-”

“No, I’ll come down.”

He waited. The fog was sailing overhead, bypassing this exclusive enclave on its way to obscure the less privileged neighborhoods. It was chilly; San Francisco summer wouldn’t arrive till September. He thought of Shar: how she loved the warm, golden autumn days…

And again she’d get to enjoy them. His relief on hearing she was going to be okay had made him weak; the tension he’d been carrying around since the night of her attack had flowed out of him. He hadn’t thought it possible, after what he’d witnessed that last night at the Brandt Institute, that his aunt would live, let alone be whole again. But by some miracle she would.

The building’s door opened, and a heavyset woman with short gray hair looked out. “Okay, where’s this identification?” she asked.

He took out both his private investigator’s and driver’s licenses and passed them to her. The door closed, then opened a few moments later. “All right,” she said, “we can talk here in the lobby. My neighbors are only a few yards away. You try anything, they’ll be on you pretty quick.”

Mick stepped onto what she called the lobby. It was small with a mirrored wall and no furnishings. The woman took up most of the space.

“Thank you, Ms…?”

“Kelly. Mimi Kelly.”

“I appreciate you talking with me. How do you know Diane?”

“I don’t.”

“But she gets mail here.”

“You ever heard of a drop?”

“So d’you hold the mail or forward it?”

“Forward to a P.O. box.”

“What about phone calls?”

“I screen them, relay them to another machine.”

“Will you give me the phone and P.O. box numbers?”

She shifted her stance, folded her arms across her pendulous breasts. “I don’t give out that information; this is a business for me.”

“You have other clients, then.”

“Honey, I got clients whose names would make your eyes bug out. People want a fancy address for one reason or another. And I’m happy to live at that address.”

“You have backing for your business? Somebody who finances your living expenses?”

“Once, a long time ago, I did. My uncle, he’s dead. Left me all his money; now I own the building.”

Mick’s guess was that Susan Angelo had fled the city or had gone to ground at the place where she really lived. He thought about what she’d admitted to them, then took out his phone and checked San Francisco listings. None, but the one he was looking for could be easily accessed via search engine. He got it and moments later he was headed downhill to the Marina district.

Quiet in the entry courtyard of this Spanish-style house on Mallorca Way-a building of a type predominant in this bayside neighborhood. Sweet smell of some night-blooming plant and pungent odor of recently watered earth. In spite of the drifting fog he thought of summer nights at his grandparents’ house in San Diego, where his father had parked the family while he went out on the road with other people’s bands before he made it on his own. His uncle John-who was currently hanging around Shar and Hy’s place and annoying the hell out of Hy-lived with his new wife and two boys in the old homeplace now. Maybe after Shar was better, they’d pay a visit…

He went to the front door of the house, hit the bell. Chimes rang inside, but no one came. There were lights on in the room to the right of the door. He rang again. No response.

Well, maybe his theory had been wrong.

He was about to turn away when he noticed a faint odor that contrasted sharply with that of the plants in the courtyard. He sniffed. Cordite. A gun had been fired here recently, maybe more than once.

He put his hand on the door latch. It moved. He hesitated.

He wasn’t armed, wasn’t even firearms-qualified. In fact, he had never so much as held a gun in his hands. And he sure as hell didn’t want to walk into another scene like the one at the lodge in Big Sur. That experience had convinced him he couldn’t take blood and gore.

Besides, entering struck him as an unnecessary risk. A shooter could be waiting inside and blast him when he walked in. Or he could jeopardize a possible crime scene-and his license-by inadvertently tampering with evidence.

But maybe somebody in there needed help? If so, he couldn’t do anything for them. Only the paramedics could.

Maybe he was rationalizing, but there was no way he wanted to step through that door.

He took out his phone and dialed 911. Then, since Craig and Adah lived only a couple of blocks away, he called them and asked for their supportive presence.

Come on, Dom-you know me. Give me a break here.”

Craig watched Adah as she faced down Dominick Rayborn, the investigator who had replaced her on the SFPD’s homicide squad. Around them squad cars’ lights pulsed and an ambulance pulled away. Two body bags had been removed from Jim Yatz’s house. A press van from the local CBS affiliate had just driven up and double-parked next to others from ABC and NBC.

Rayborn saw it, and his sharp-featured face ticked with annoyance. “Dammit, Adah, I can’t stand here jawing with you. Not when some asshole with a microphone is about to light on me.”

“You’ve cleared and secured the scene. You’ll need to interview our operative who called this in. We can all go down to the Hall-”

“No, that’s the last thing I need-” He broke off, said to a uniform, “Get her out of here!” Her being a TV newswoman who had slipped past the police barricade. “The goddamn media vultures’ll be waiting on the steps of the Hall.”

“So come to my place.”

He hesitated. “Irregular, but it might work. You’ll have this operative there-what’s his name?-Mick Savage.”

“Yes. Craig and I are only a couple of blocks away; when Mick called, we walked over. He can walk back with us, to avoid attracting attention. Then you shake the press vans and come by.”