Bill Pronzini: Betrayers

“Yes, it is.”

“Not to mention the final straw. That’s when I decided it was time to hire an investigator. The police weren’t doing a thing, not a thing.”

She’d told me all that before. I nodded patiently and asked, “Were there any signs of forced entry?”

“Not that Leonard and I could find.”

Mrs. Abbott said abruptly, “Oh, there he is now. He must have heard us talking about him. He’s very sensitive that way.”

I looked where she was looking, off to one side and behind where I was sitting. There was nobody there. I almost said, You don’t mean your dead husband’s ghost, but changed it at the last second to, “Who?”

“Spike,” she said. “Spike, dear, come and meet the nice man Helen brought to help us.”

The cat that came sauntering around the sofa was a rotund and middle-aged orange tabby, with wicked amber eyes and a great swaying underbelly that brushed the carpet as he moved. He plunked himself down five feet from where I was sitting, paying no attention to any of us, and began to lick his shoulder. For a cat that had been sick as a dog two days ago, he looked pretty fit.

“Mrs. Abbott,” I said, “who has a key to this house?”

She blinked at me behind her granny glasses. “Key?”

“Besides you and Mrs. Alvarez, I mean.”

“Why, Charley has one, of course.”

“Any other member of your family?”

“Charley is my only living relative.”

“Is there anyone else who- uff! ”

An orange blur had come flying through the air and a pair of meaty forepaws nearly destroyed what was left of my manly pride. The pain made me writhe a little, but the movement didn’t dislodge Spike; he had all four claws anchored to various portions of my lap. I thought an evil thought involving retribution, but it died when he commenced a noisy purring. Like a fool I put forth a tentative hand and petted him. He tolerated that for all of five seconds. Then he bit me on the soft webbing between my thumb and forefinger, jumped down, and streaked wildly out of the room.

“He likes you,” Mrs. Abbott said, smiling.

I looked at her.

“Oh, he does,” she said. “It’s just his way with strangers. When Spike nips you, it’s a sign of affection.”

I looked down at my hand.

The sign of affection was bleeding.

One of those cases, all right. A bigger cutie, in fact, than I’d anticipated after Helen Alvarez started laying it out for me in my office. I’d tried to avoid taking it on, but Jake Runyon and Alex Chavez had been out on other business and Tamara was sympathetic to Mrs. Alvarez, so I had no backup. No backbone, either, when it comes to this kind of case. How do you turn down a determined seventy-year-old widow with a problem neither the police nor most other private agencies will touch?

Mrs. Alvarez was not someone who listened to “no” when she wanted to hear “yes.” She pleaded; she cajoled; she gave me the kind of sad, anxious, worried, reproving looks elderly women cultivate to an art form-the kind calculated to make you feel heartless and ashamed of yourself and to melt your resistance faster than fire melts wax.

I hung in there for a while, waffling, but Tamara put an end to my resistance. She’d established, with my blessings, an agency policy of taking on pro bono cases for individuals and small businesses who couldn’t afford our fees-a worthwhile public service designed mainly for the benefit of ethnic minorities. Helen Alvarez was not really a minority, being an Angla married to a deceased Latino, and not exactly indigent, but that didn’t make any difference to Tamara. She said we’d take the case, in a no-nonsense voice, and that took care of that. She’d been in a grumpy, distant mood for the past couple of weeks, snapping and growling when something went wrong or she didn’t get her way, and arguing with her when she was like that was useless. The Good Tamara was on vacation. The Bad Tamara who sometimes replaced her was a pain in the ass.

So I’d listened to Helen Alvarez’s tale and written down all the salient facts and agreed to interview Margaret Abbott. Mrs. Abbott’s woes had begun three months ago, when Allan and Doris Patterson and the City of San Francisco had contrived to steal her house and property. The word “steal” was Mrs. Alvarez’s, not mine.

It seemed the Pattersons, who owned a real estate firm in the Outer Richmond, had bought the Abbott property at a city-held auction where it was being sold for nonpayment of property taxes dating back to the death of Mrs. Abbott’s husband in 2000. She refused to vacate the premises, so they’d sought to have her legally evicted. Sheriff’s deputies declined to carry out the eviction notice, however, after a Sheriff’s Department administrator went out to talk to her and concluded that she was the innocent victim of circumstances and cold-hearted bureaucracy.

Margaret Abbott’s husband had always handled the couple’s finances; she was an old-fashioned sheltered housewife who knew nothing at all about such matters as property taxes. She hadn’t heeded notices of delinquency mailed to her by the city tax collector because she didn’t understand what they were and hadn’t sought to find out from her nephew or Mrs. Alvarez or anyone else. When the tax collector received no response from Mrs. Abbott, he ordered her property put up for auction without first making an effort to contact her personally. House and property were subsequently sold to the Pattersons for $286,000, about a third of what they were worth on the current real estate market. Mrs. Abbott hadn’t even been told that an auction was being held.

Armed with this information, the Sheriff’s Department administrator went to the mayor and to the local newspapers on her behalf. The mayor got the Board of Supervisors to approve city funds to reimburse the Pattersons, so as to allow Mrs. Abbott to keep her home. But the Pattersons refused to accept the reimbursement; they wanted the property and the fat killing they’d make when they sold it.

They hired an attorney, which prompted Helen Alvarez to step in and enlist the help of lawyers from Legal Aid for the Elderly. A stay of the eviction order was obtained and the matter was put before a superior court judge, who ruled in favor of Margaret Abbott. She was entitled not only to her property, he decided, but also to a tax waiver from the city because she lived on a fixed income. The Pattersons might have tried to take the case to a higher court, except for the fact that negative media attention was harming their business. So, Mrs. Alvarez said, they “crawled back into the woodwork. But if you ask me, they’ve come crawling right back out again.”

It was her contention that the Pattersons were responsible for the nocturnal “reign of terror” against Mrs. Abbott out of “just plain vindictive meanness. And maybe because they think that if they drive Margaret out of her mind or straight into her grave, they can get their greedy claws on her property after all.” How could they hope to do that? I’d asked. Mrs. Alvarez didn’t know, but if there was a way, “those two slime-balls have figured it out.”

That explanation didn’t make much sense to me. But based on what I’d been told so far, I couldn’t think of a better one. Margaret Abbott lived on a quiet street in a quiet residential neighborhood; she seldom left the house anymore, got on well with her neighbors and her nephew, hadn’t an enemy in the world or any money or valuables other than her house and property that anybody could be after. If not the Pattersons, then who would want to bedevil a harmless old woman? And why?

Well, I could probably rule out Spike the psychotic cat and the malevolent spirit of Mrs. Abbott’s late husband. If old Carl’s shade really was lurking around here somewhere, Helen Alvarez would just have to get herself another detective.