At least Lottie-who’s one of my fellow operative at McCone Investigations-had left work behind. I was still steamed after having spent last night hunkered down in the rhododendrons at some guy’s Hillsborough estate, watching him go through the same damn motions that he had been going through for over a week. Watching him on a damp October night whose every chill breeze whispered the word pneumonia. And I was even more steamed about the conversation I’d had this morning with my aunt and boss, Sharon McCone.
Just thinking about it made me come up too fast at the start of a hairpin curve. I corrected in time, but Lottie’s arms tightened around me, and she said, “For God’s sake, Mick!” after that I took it slower until we got the state beach at San Gregorio. While I was securing the bike in the parking area, Lottie ran off toward the sand.
By the time I followed her, Lottie was dancing along the water’s edge, her long dark-brown curls flaring and bouncing. She saw me and called, “Last one in’s a lovesick armadillo!” Lottie’s got seven years on me, but sometimes she’s as much a kid as my little sister, and when she gets excited, the Texas accent she tried to leave behind in Archer City comes out-along with what Shar calls Lottie’s “Texasisms.” Today Lottie was as Texas as Lone Star beer.
We didn’t really plan to go in the water; it’s cold along the northern California coast, even in the summer. So I caught up with her and grabbed her hand, and we strolled south to where the beach backed up against the cliffs. There were only three people around-a daddy and two kids, maybe around seven and eight. The kids were building sand castles, and the daddy was lying on his back, his head propped on a driftwood log. Lottie and I parked it on another log and watched the construction project.
“You want to tell me about it?” she asked.
“About what?”
“Whatever’s got you tryin’ to see if that bike can fly.”
“Just a problem at work, is all. No big deal. Shar’s got me on this case that’s going no place, no way, no how. You’d think she’d give up. The woman’s fixated.”
Lottie waited.
“Okay,” I said after a minute, “this is the situation. There’s this dude, seriously weird. Name of Harry Homestead. Lives all alone in this mansion down the Peninsula that makes my dad’s place look like a homeless shelter.”
“Hard to believe that.” Lottie’s a little in awe of my father, who makes an obscene heap of money as a country singer.
“Well, believe it. Seven and a half years ago this dud married big bucks. Older lady, Susan Cross, of the oil and banking family. Way back when, her forebears robbed practically everybody dumber than them who ever trekked through Emigrant Gap. Harry, though, he was kind of questionable, being from someplace nobody ever heard of in Nebraska and having-among other things-run a carnival concession and done a stint as a dealer in Vegas. That’s where Susan met him, Vegas. And she married him a few weeks later, without a prenup. Maybe she thought he was exotic, after years of boring high-society life with her late husband. Who knows what makes people get together?”
Lottie grinned and squeezed my hand. A lot of people thought we were an unlikely couple.
“Anyway,” I went on, “one thing the two of them had in common was gardening. Harry and Susan loved flowers and spent a lot of time in the greenhouse at her Hillsborough estate. A couple of months after the wedding, one of her arrangements won what I guess you’d call the Grammy of gardening, and the picture in our file shows them with it, smiling like it was their firstborn and looking in love.”
“I take it the wedded bliss didn’t last?”
“You got it. Four months later, to the day, Susan disappeared. Vanished totally, without a trace. Leaving Harry in the Hillsborough mansion with the joint checkbooks. Everybody knew he’d murdered her, and that it was only a matter of time till he looted the accounts and split.”
“But he didn’t.”
“Nope. Harry stayed put. He didn’t even spend much money, just stayed on in the mansion and let the trust department of the bank pay the bills like they always did. He puttered around in the greenhouse, didn’t date, didn’t travel. Nobody knew if he was grieving, because he didn’t have any friends. He just lay low and cooperated with the cops who were investigating his wife’s disappearance.”
“So maybe he didn’t kill her after all.”
“Wrong again. At least, according to Shar. She and her client, Susan Cross’s attorney, claim Harry’s a patient man. He’s been waiting, they say, for the seven years to pass so he can get Susan declared legally dead. And if he has, all that waiting’ll pay off next week when he goes to court. Then all the loot’ll belong to him.”
“So that’s what’s kept you so busy lately. Trying to get the goods on Harry.”
“Yep. Shar says that all people leave traces of their crimes, and it’s just a matter of pinpointing and interpreting them. She’s sure that Harry’s feeling secure as his court date approaches and that he’s bound to do something stupid.”
“After seven years of being careful? I don’t think so.”
“That’s what I told Shar. You’d think she’d give up, wouldn’t you?”
Lottie shrugged.”Maybe, maybe not. I have a hard time giving up on anything. Even you.”
Now what the hell did that mean? I didn’t want to ask. Instead I watched the kids build their castles, and brooded about my morning conference with my aunt Sharon.
“So what’ve got here, Mick?” Shar had asked me.
She looked bright-eyed and pretty and sexy-for an old broad of forty. Her boyfriend, Hy Ripinsky, must’ve been in town. “What we’ve got is zilch,” I said.
She gave me a look that said, Impossible.
“Zilch,” I said again, but not as firmly. “Here’s how it went: Harry came out of the mansion at seven-thirty and went to the greenhouse. Stayed there till close to nine. Went inside and spent a couple hours in the room the house plans call the library.” I’d got hold of the plans in a perfectly legal way, since the mansion was registered as a state historical building. “Then he went to the master-bedroom wing, and the lights there went out around midnight.”
Shar seemed to be waiting.
“That’s all there is.” I couldn’t hold back and longer. “This surveillance is idiotic, and on top of that, I think I’ve caught a cold.”
Now she looked sad. Oh, hell was she thinking I didn’t have what it takes for the business? Normally, I don’t get to do much field work, just sit at the computer, and she told me this case was a chance to prove my abilities. “Mick,” she said after a minute, “maybe it’ll help to review the case from day one.”
“Whatever.” I slumped down in the chair, resigned to the rehash of details I already knew by heart.
Shar opened the file in front of her, paged through it. “Susan Cross disappeared on October nineteen, six months and five days after she married Harry Homestead. That morning she drove to the city, left her car for an oil change at the Sutter-Stockton garage, and kept a nine-thirty appointment at Yosh for Hair on Maiden Lane. According to Homestead, he was to meet her in the lobby of the Saint Francis at twelve-thirty and take her to a nearby restaurant for lunch. Cross never showed.
“Homestead waited at the hotel till one-thirty. Staff members saw him arrive and later go to the phones. He called the beauty salon, and they told him Cross left around eleven. He checked the restaurant, thinking they’d got their signals crossed about where to meet; called several of her friends, her attorney, and her banker, on the chance she’d stopped to see one of them and got held up. Nobody had seen her. Finally, he called the police.”