Ray flipped his notebook back to the pages in the front. “There is no need to be that way, Charlie. I’m just trying to help.”
“It might have been bigger,” Charlie said, remembering. “Like a monkey SUV—like what you might drive if you were transporting—I don’t know—a barrel of monkeys.”
Ray cringed, then read from the pages. “I went to the Johnson woman’s house. No one is living there, but the house isn’t on the market. I didn’t see the niece you talked about. Funny thing is, the neighbors knew she’d been sick, but no one had heard that she’d died. In fact, one guy said he thought he saw her getting into a U-Haul truck with a couple of movers last week.”
“Last week? Her niece said that she died two weeks ago.”
“No niece.”
“What?”
“Esther Johnson doesn’t have a niece. She was an only child. Didn’t have brothers or sisters, and no nieces on her late husband’s side of the family.”
“So she’s alive?”
“Apparently.” Ray handed Charlie a photograph. “That’s her latest driver’s-license photo. This changes things. Now we’re looking for a missing person, someone who will leave a trail. But the other one—Irena—is even better.” He handed Charlie another picture.
“She’s not dead either?”
“Oh, there was a death notice in the paper three weeks ago, but here’s the giveaway—all of her bills are still being paid, by personal check. Checks she signed.” Ray sat back on his stool, smiling, feeling the sweetness of righteous indignation over the monkey theory, and a little guilt alleviation for not telling Charlie about the special transactions.
“Well?” Charlie finally asked.
“She’s at her sister’s house in the Sunset. Here’s the address.” Ray tore a page out of his notebook and handed it to Charlie.
21
COMMON COURTESY
Charlie was torn—he really wanted to take his sword-cane, but he couldn’t carry it while using the crutches. He considered duct-taping it to one of the crutches, but he thought that might attract attention.
“You want me to go with you?” Ray asked. “I mean, you okay to drive, with your leg and all?”
“I’ll be fine,” Charlie said. “Someone needs to watch the store.”
“Charlie, before you go, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.” Don’t ask, don’t ask, don’t ask, Charlie thought.
“Why did you need me to find these two women?”
You robot-necked bastard, you had to ask. “I told you, estate stuff.” Charlie shrugged. No big deal, let it go, nothing to see here.
“Yeah, I know you told me that, and normally that would make sense, but I found out a lot about these two while looking for them—no one in either of their families has died recently.”
“Funny thing,” Charlie said, juggling his keys, the cane, his date book, and his crutches by the back door. “Both bequests were from nonrelatives. Old friends.” No wonder women don’t like you, you just won’t leave things alone.
“Uh-huh,” Ray said, unconvinced. “You know, when people run, when they go as far as faking their own death to get away, they are usually running from something. Are you that something, Charlie?”
“Ray, listen to yourself. Are you back on your serial-killer thing? I thought Rivera explained that.”
“So this is for Rivera?”
“Let’s say he’s interested,” Charlie said.
“Why didn’t you just say so?”
Charlie sighed. “Ray, I’m not supposed to talk about this stuff, you know that. Fourth Amendment and all. I came to you because you’re good, and you have contacts. I depend on you and I trust you. I think you know that you can depend on me and trust me, right? I mean, in all these years, I’ve never put your disability pension in jeopardy by being careless about our arrangement, have I?”
It was a threat, however subtle, and Charlie felt bad for doing it, but he just couldn’t let Ray continue to push on this, particularly since he was in unexplored territory himself—he didn’t even know what kind of bluff he was covering.
“So Mrs. Johnson isn’t going to end up dead if I find her for you?”
“I will not lay a hand on Mrs. Johnson or Mrs. Pojo…Mrs. Pokojo—or that other woman either. You have my word on it.” Charlie raised his hand as if swearing on a Bible and dropped one of his crutches.
“Why don’t you just use the cane?” Ray said.
“Right,” Charlie said. He leaned the crutches on the door and tried his weight on the bad leg and the cane. The doctors had, indeed, said that it was just a flesh wound, so there was no tendon damage, just muscle, but it hurt like hell to put any weight on that foot. The cane would work, he decided. “I should be back to relieve you before five.” He limped out the door.
Ray didn’t like being lied to. He’d had quite enough of that from his desperate Filipinas and was becoming sensitive about being taken for a fool. Who did Charlie Asher think he was fooling? As soon as he got the store squared away, he’d give Rivera a call and see for himself.
He went out into the store and did a little dusting, then went to Charlie’s “special” rack, where he kept the weird estate items that he made such a fuss about. You were only supposed to sell one to each customer, but Ray had sold five of them to the same woman in the last two weeks. He knew he should have said something to Charlie, but really, why? Charlie wasn’t being open with him about anything, it seemed.
Besides, the woman who bought the stuff was cute, and she’d smiled at Ray. She had nice hair, a cute figure, and really striking light blue eyes. Plus there was something about her voice—she seemed so, what? Peaceful, maybe. Like she knew that everything was going to be okay and no one needed to worry. Maybe he was projecting. And she didn’t have an Adam’s apple, which was a big plus in Ray’s book lately. He’d tried to get her name, even get a look at something in her wallet, but she’d paid in cash and had been as careful as a poker player covering her cards. If she’d driven, she’d parked too far away for him to see her get into her car from the store, so there was no license number to trace.
He resolved to ask her name if she came in today. And she was due to come in. She only came in when he was working alone. He’d seen her check through the window once when he was working with Lily, and only came into the store later when Lily was gone. He really hoped she’d come in.
He tried to calm himself down for his call to Rivera. He didn’t want to seem like a rube to a guy who was still on the job. He used his own cell phone for the call so Rivera would see it was him calling.
Charlie didn’t like leaving Sophie for this long, given what had happened a few days ago, but on the other hand, whatever might be threatening her was obviously being caused by his missing these two soul vessels. The quicker he fixed the problem, the quicker the threat would be diminished. Besides, the hellhounds were her best defense, and he’d given express instructions to Mrs. Ling that the dogs and Sophie were not to be separated for any amount of time, for any reason.
He took Presidio Boulevard through Golden Gate Park into the Sunset, reminding himself to take Sophie to the Japanese Tea Garden to feed the koi, now that her plague on pets seemed to have subsided.
The Sunset district lay just south of Golden Gate Park, bordered by the American Highway and Ocean Beach on the west, and Twin Peaks and the University of San Francisco on the east. It had once been a suburb, until the city expanded to include it, and many of its houses were modest, single-story family dwellings, built en masse in the 1940s and ’50s. They were like the mosaics of little boxes that peppered neighborhoods across the entire country in that postwar period, but in San Francisco, where so much had been built after the quake and fire of ’06, then again in the economic boom of the late twentieth century, they seemed like anachronisms from both ends of time. Charlie felt like he was driving through the Eisenhower era, at least until he passed a mother with a shaved head and tribal tattoos on her scalp pushing twins in a double stroller.