But he didn’t do it. After a few seconds he went all loose and saggy, as if somebody had cut his strings. He took a stumbling step backward, tripped over the lowest of the stairs, and sat down jarringly on the next one above. Then he put his head in his hands.
“I never done anything wrong before in my life,” he said. “Never. But the bills been piling up, it’s so goddamn hard to live these days, and they been talking about laying people off where I work and I was afraid I’d lose my house… ah, God, I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Derisive snort from Helen Alvarez. Nothing from me. I’d heard that kind of self-pitying, self-justifying explanation for criminal behavior too many times before.
Belasco lifted his head, aimed a moist, beseeching look at my client. “I never meant for Margaret to die, Helen. You got to believe that. Just force her out of there so Charley could take over the house, that’s all. I like her, she’s been a good neighbor. I never meant to hurt her.”
Mrs. Alvarez wasn’t buying any of that. She called him a couple more names, one of which surprised me and made him cringe. He hid his face in his hands again.
Another small mind at work. Half-wits and knaves, fools and assholes-more of each than ever before, proliferating like weeds in what had started out as a pristine garden. It’s a hell of a world we live in, I thought. A hell of a mess we’re making of the garden.
Helen Alvarez and I left Belasco sitting there on his stoop-he wasn’t going anywhere; he had no place to go and he knew it-and went in to gently break the news to Margaret Abbott. I thought it might be a difficult job, that she’d be shocked and upset hearing that her nephew and a longtime neighbor had both betrayed her trust, but she took it better than I’d expected. I guess maybe you get philosophical about most things, even the evils in the world, when you’re eighty-five. Mrs. Alvarez had been and still was considerably more outraged than Mrs. Abbott.
While we were talking, Spike came into the room and hopped up on Mrs. Abbott’s lap. She said, stroking him, “You’re a hero, dear. Yes, you are.” Then she sighed and asked me, “Will both Charley and Everett go to prison?”
“If you press charges against them, they’ll probably get some jail time.”
“For how long?”
“Breaking and entering, trespassing, malicious destruction of property, intent to defraud, intent to inflict bodily harm… with a strict judge, they could each get three years or more.”
“Oh. That seems like a long time.”
“Not long enough, if you ask me,” Helen Alvarez said. “Not nearly long enough.”
“Do I have to press charges against them?”
The question surprised Mrs. Alvarez. She said, “Of course you do, Margaret. After what they put you through? How could you not press charges?”
“I don’t know. Three years behind bars…”
“Margaret, listen to me; you can’t just let them walk away from this. What if they try something like it again? They could, you know. They’re just stupid and venal enough, both of them.”
“I suppose you’re right. But still…”
My cell phone, with its burbling ringtone, interrupted the discussion. Inconvenient as usual, but at least this time I wasn’t in the car driving.
Tamara. “I’ve got that name you asked for this morning. Z.U. at Whitney Middle School.”
“Hold on a minute.” I excused myself, went out onto the front porch. “Okay, go ahead.”
“Zachary Ullman. He’s the only Z.U. at the school.”
“What’s his record like?”
“Clean,” she said. “Never been in trouble. Not even so much as a parking ticket.”
“Parking ticket? A middle school student can’t be old enough to drive.”
“He’s not a student. Is that what you thought?”
“What is he, then?”
“He’s a teacher,” Tamara said. “History and social studies. Been at Whitney eleven years.”
My God. The tin box, the cocaine… one of Emily’s teachers!
17
TAMARA
Third time roaming around the Western Addition was the charm.
One light brown five-year-old Buick LeSabre parked on Steiner Street a block and a half from Psychic Readings by Alisha.
She’d left work early, headed over to the neighborhood again-compulsive about it now-and her figuring had finally paid off. Fresh excitement made her thump the steering wheel with her fist. She hunted up a parking space for the Toyota, hurried back to the Buick. The right front fender hadn’t been visible when she drove by, but she knew it would be scraped and dinged, and it was. No question this was Lucas’s car.
She looked both ways along the street. A few pedestrians, but no familiar black face. First thing, she noted the license plate number and quickly wrote it down. Then, casually, as if she owned the damn thing, she tried the passenger side door. Locked. She bent to peer through the window. Front seat: empty. Backseat: empty except for a light jacket that she didn’t recognize. Another check of the passersby, and around to the driver’s door. Also locked. So no chance at whatever ID items, such as an insurance card, he might keep in the dash compartment.
Not that it mattered, necessarily. The plate number would be enough to ID the registered owner-either Lucas or Mama. Unless they’d switched license plates for some reason…
Better not be another dead end, Tamara thought. Not when she was so close… better not be.
It wasn’t.
The Buick’s owner was Alisha J. Delman, with an address in Oxnard. So that was where Mama and Lucas had come from, Southern California. Where they’d been living when the car was registered five years ago, anyhow.
Tamara text-messaged Felice at the SFPD to ask for a quick callback. When Felice complied a few minutes later, she grumbled-as Marjorie at the DMV had grumbled-about being called on too often lately. Some smooth-talking and the promise of a few extra dollars for services rendered and Felice gave in and agreed to run Alisha J. Delman’s name through the system.
“Do it ASAP, okay? If you find anything, call me right away. And if there’s a mug shot in the file, e-mail it to me.”
“Hey, I can’t do that,” Felice said. “Information is one thing, but I can’t be e-mailing files-”
“Oh, hell, Felice. Nobody’s looking over your shoulder down there.”
“Not right now, maybe. But there’s a review coming up next month.”
“You worried about that?”
“No, not really, but-” “Just this one time. I won’t ask again.”
“Yeah, sure, I’ve heard that before. Why do you want a mug shot? You’re not planning to download it, show it to anybody?”
“No. Just for my own information. I’ll delete it right away.”
“… All right, I’ll do it for another fifty.”
“Damn, girl! You getting greedy now?”
“I need the money, Tam.”
“I’ll give you twenty-five.”
“Uh-uh. Got to be fifty for something like this.”
Everybody had their hand out these days, not that you could blame them with the economy in the tank. The fifty dollars would have to come out of her pocket, too.
“Okay, fifty. But this one time only.”
“Same with e-mailing files,” Felice said.
She called back twenty minutes later. And the info she had was worth five times fifty dollars.
Alisha J. Delman, fifty-three years old, African American, had a record dating back to the mid-1980s. Misdemeanors, mostly, in the L.A. and San Diego areas: operating illegal fortune-telling businesses and offering psychic-reading services without a license. But there were two felony charges, one for a bait-and-switch con game, the other for a charity swindle that sounded like it might be the prototype of Operation Save-bilking investors in a nonexistent company that was supposed to help black home owners avoid foreclosure. She’d served two years in Tehachapi for her part in the swindle.