Tucker Devries was the perp, all right.
The only other room was a small bedroom. More cheap furniture in there. The nightstand, the bureau drawers, held nothing of interest. The closet was too small for more than a few items of clothing on hangers, a suitcase, a couple of cardboard cartons. No sign of the inherited trunk. Devries had either stored it or gotten rid of it.
Runyon sifted through the contents of the two cartons. One held photographs, bundled together and fastened with rubber bands. Discards, probably, ones Devries didn’t deem worthy of display. The other contained his mother’s belongings, some or all of what he’d decided to keep.
Letters. Wedding portrait of an attractive blond woman and a bushy-haired man, both in their late teens—Anthony and Jenny Noakes. Divorce papers. Baby pictures, and snapshots of a boy from toddler to about age seven. Locks of dark blond hair and other small keepsakes. A woman’s hat made out of some kind of soft animal fur. Odds and ends that meant nothing to Runyon.
He thumbed through the letters. From Aunt Pauline and a friend in Ukiah named Darlene, mostly. A couple from men, short and suggestive of sexual relationships;
none of the names was familiar. Nothing bearing Lloyd Henderson’s name, but two notes in a man’s hand and signed with the initial
L.
One:
Can’t wait to see you again. I’ll be at the camp alone next weekend. See you then. Love.
The other:
Meet me tonight usual place. I want you so much!
Both notes written on what looked like letterhead stationery with the heads cut off. No dates on either.
Nothing there to indicate motive. Had Devries found something else in the trunk, more notes, maybe, that he’d kept with him or destroyed?
The twenty minutes were almost up. Quick looks through drawers in the kitchenette and the end table in the living room, and among a neat stack of papers and photography magazines on the coffee table, produced zip. There wasn’t anything in the apartment to indicate where Devries might be holing up.
Runyon locked up, walked down and returned the passkey to Mrs. Morales. “If you see Devries in the next day or two,” he said, “give me a call at either of the numbers on my card. It’s worth another twenty dollars to me.”
“Sure, why not.”
“And if he does show, don’t say anything about my being here looking for him.”
“You think I’m crazy?” She surprised him with a conspiratorial wink. “I ain’t even gonna tell my husband about the forty dollars.”
I
n the car he sat for a time with his hands on the steering wheel, trying to figure his next move.
Los Alegres. Sure, that much was clear. If Devries
wasn’t here, hadn’t been here in a week or more, then that was where he was. But the problem was still the same one they’d faced all along.
How to find him.
I
stayed away from the agency on Thursday morning, with the intention of doing the same in the afternoon. After yesterday’s horror show I figured I was entitled. Write out my witnesss statement and drop it off at the Hall of Justice later on. Putter a little, read a little, catch up on cataloging my pulp collection. Quiet, relaxing day.
Yeah, sure. I should’ve known better.
I forgot about that insidious invention, the telephone. Silly me. If my brain had been functioning properly, I would have turned off the cell, unplugged the house phone, and drowned the answering machine in the bathtub.
The damn things, cell and house phones both, kept up a steady clamor from nine o’clock on. Three calls from Tamara. Three calls from media people, starting with Joe DeFalco, my old muckraking
Chronicle
buddy. Barney Rivera. Gregory Pollexfen. Even a damn telemarketer.
After the first two calls—Tamara, with a progress report from Jake Runyon on the Henderson investigation, and DeFalco—I wised up and cannily began to monitor the barrage of incoming calls. So I didn’t have to talk to two of the relentless media, or the telemarketer. Or Rivera, whose sadistic imp I could hear lurking inside his message: “Call me. We need to talk.” I knew what he wanted; Tamara had already told me he’d phoned the agency asking for a status report on the missing books and reminding her that the claim investigation was still open. I’d deal with him at my convenience, not his.
The other calls I answered. Tamara’s second had to do with another agency matter. I picked up when I heard Pollexfen’s voice because he sounded upset and didn’t say in the message he started to leave why he was bothering me at home. Curiosity is sometimes one of my strong points, sometimes one of the weak.
“The police haven’t found my first editions,” he said without any preamble. “They searched Jeremy’s records and the Coyne woman’s apartment and there’s no sign of them or what was done with them.”
“So I’ve heard. That’s too bad.”
“Too bad? Is that all you have to say?”
“They’ll turn up eventually. Or some evidence of disposal will.”
“The police don’t care about rare books. They won’t even let me into the library to clean up the mess. Blood spattered everywhere … more than a few volumes may be irreparably damaged.”
Some cold bird, Pollexfen. His brother-in-law had died in that room, apparently by his wife’s hand, and his primary concern was possible damage to his books.
“Why tell me, Mr. Pollexfen?”
“Why? Why do you think? You’re the only investigator I have any faith in.”
“It’s not my case any longer. The police—”
“Hang the police. What happened to my first editions is still an unresolved insurance matter. I’ve already spoken to Mr. Rivera at Great Western and he agrees. The investigation, your investigation, is to continue as long as the eight books remain unaccounted for.”
That little son of a bitch. He’d keep me on the hook as long as possible so he could laugh all the harder when I failed. Well, screw him and screw Gregory Pollexfen.
“If it continues,” I said, “it’ll be by somebody else. As far as I’m concerned, I’m no longer employed as an independent contractor by Great Western Insurance.”
“But you can’t quit,” he said angrily. “You
have
to keep investigating—”
I said, “No, I don’t,” and hung up on him.
The satisfaction was premature. I wasn’t done with the Pollexfen case, much as I wanted to be; Tamara’s third call convinced me of that.
“I just heard from Paul DiSantis,” she said. “Wants to see you ASAP. Urgent.”
“What about?”
“Mrs. Pollexfen. He says she’s innocent. Says her defense team wants to hire us to prove it.”
“Defense team?”
“Him and the criminal lawyer he got for her. Arthur Sayers. Only the best for the rich folks, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“I think we should do it, and not just for the money. High profile, you know what I’m saying? Good for business.”
Arguable, but I let it pass.
“I told DiSantis I’d get back to him as soon as I talked to you. Wouldn’t do any harm to listen to what he has to say, right?”
I tightened my grip around the receiver’s hard plastic neck and strangled it a little, just for fun. “My office,” I said. “One o’clock.”
A
ngelina did not kill her brother,” DiSantis said. “She couldn’t have.”
“No? Why not?”
“Because she was unconscious for three hours before the shooting.”
“Passed out drunk? Pretty flimsy defense.”
He leaned forward in the client’s chair. He didn’t look quite as suave and self-possessed today. Angry, earnest, more than a little worried. He wasn’t just playing bed games with Angelina Pollexfen, I thought; he genuinely cared for her.
“She wasn’t drunk,” he said, “she was drugged.”
“Drugged? She reeked of gin.”
“Two martinis, that’s all she had. You saw how much she drinks—two martinis wouldn’t give her a mild buzz,
much less cause her to pass out. Drinking the last one in the library is all she remembers until she woke up in police custody.”
“That doesn’t mean she was drugged.”
“The tox screen we had done does. Clonazepam. It’s still in her system.”
“What’s clonazepam?”
“It’s prescribed for anxiety disorders, among other things. A large dose mixed with alcohol makes a person sick and disoriented. And it can result in short-term memory loss.”
“You must have told the police about this. What did they say?”
“That it doesn’t change anything. That she took it herself, willingly.”
“Well?”
“She wouldn’t and she didn’t.”
“But she had a prescription for it?”
“Yes. For Klonopin, a trade name for the stuff,” he said. “Her doctor gave it to her a while back, when she was having mild panic attacks at night. There’s a supply in her bathroom medicine cabinet. She swears she hasn’t taken any in weeks, and that she’d never voluntarily take it with alcohol.”
“No? Why not?”
“She did that once and it made her sick. Very sick. She had to have her stomach pumped. That’s not an experience anyone would want to repeat.”
The time the EMTs had been called to the house, I thought. Matter of public record and a point in her favor.
“What’s her claim?” I asked. “That her brother spiked her martinis?”
“No. Her husband. He made the martinis, but he drank scotch himself.”
“So she’s saying Pollexfen drugged both her and Cullrane?”
“She’s not sure about Cullrane. We asked the police to have a tox screen done on him, but they said it wouldn’t make any difference if clonazepam is found in his system, she could’ve given it to him as well as to herself.”
“Why would Pollexfen drug the two of them?”
“Isn’t that obvious? To frame her for the murder.”
“How could he do that, Mr. DiSantis? Cullrane was shot in a locked room, Mrs. Pollexfen was the only other occupant, and I was outside with Pollexfen and his secretary when the round was fired.”
“I know that, I know it doesn’t seem possible. But I believe that Angelina is telling the truth. She didn’t kill her brother. And she had nothing to do with those books being stolen.”
“She think her husband is responsible for that, too?”
“Yes.”
“Why? Why would he dream up such an elaborate scenario to frame Cullrane for theft and her for Cullrane’s murder? What does he stand to gain?”
“He hated Cullrane and he hates her.”
“There’d have to be more than that. And there’s still the fact that he couldn’t have fired the shot that killed Cullrane.”
DiSantis spread his hands. “That’s why I’m here. If
anybody can find out the truth and prove Angelina’s innocence, it’s you.”
“I’m not a miracle worker.”
“Mr. Rivera at Great Western Insurance thinks you are.”
Rivera again. I said between my teeth, “I’ll want to talk to Mrs. Pollexfen before I make any commitments. Has she been formally charged?”
“Yes.”
“Still being held, then?”
“Until tomorrow morning. Arthur has a court date at ten to try to arrange bail.”
“Can you get me in to see her?”
“Should be able to, yes. Now?”
“Now,” I said. “I need to drop off my statement at the Hall of Justice anyway.”
S
an Francisco operates eight city jails, which says something about the local crime rate. Two of them are located down the Peninsula in San Bruno, there’s a prison ward in San Francisco General Hospital, and a pair for the booking and release of prisoners and for “program-oriented rehabilitation” are in the newest jail complex on Seventh Street near the Hall of Justice. The other three are in the Hall itself, on the two top floors. One of those, on the sixth floor, houses the women’s section where Angelina Pollexfen was being held.
Every time I enter the Hall of Justice these days, I can’t help remembering that the sprawling monolith has design flaws and is a potential death trap in a high-magnitude earthquake. I don’t read the newspapers as a rule, but
Kerry does; there was an article a few years ago in the
Chronicle
about the building’s “vulnerability to calamity” that she’d called to my attention. The original structure was built in 1958 and has been expanded twice since, but none of the city administrators has seen fit to authorize the necessary retrofitting to meet current earthquake codes. There’s been plenty of talk about putting up a replacement building, yet in twenty years plans haven’t gotten much beyond the talking stage. The ever-increasing cost of tearing down the old and putting up the new back-burners it every time.
The Hall withstood the Loma Prieta quake in 1989 with only minor damage, though the power failed and prevented officers from opening an electronic door to the secured area where weapons are stored. In a stronger shake centered in or close to the city, the walls would probably crack and even if the building managed not to topple, or the section of the freeway approach to the Bay Bridge in whose shadow it sits didn’t collapse into it, it would likely trap people inside and be rendered unusable—a crisis within a crisis. All of which makes me feel just a little vulnerable in its confines, despite the fact that native San Franciscans learn early on not to be intimidated by the threat of earthquakes.
The jails in the Hall are gloomy, noisy places presided over by grim-visaged sheriff’s deputies of both sexes. DiSantis got us an audience with Angelina Pollexfen with no trouble, after which we went through the usual security checks and paperwork before being admitted to the visitors’ room. A matron brought Pollexfen out and she
and I sat down on our respective sides of the glass wall and picked up the communicating handsets. DiSantis stood behind me and, to his credit, kept his own counsel.
Different woman, Mrs. Pollexfen, than the one I’d had the adversarial lunch with on Tuesday. Orange jumpsuit in place of the expensive clothes, hair uncombed, pale face free of makeup, eyes sick and dull. The smart-ass cool had been replaced by a kind of wheedling deference.
“Thank you for coming,” she said. “Paul said you would, but after the other day … I’m sorry about the way I acted. I shouldn’t have had all those martinis.”
I waved that away. “Tell me what happened yesterday.”
“I didn’t kill Jeremy,” she said fervently. “I swear to God I didn’t.”
“Just tell me what happened.”
“I don’t know what happened. The last thing I remember is having drinks with with Jeremy and that bastard I’m married to. I started to feel woozy, I think I said something about it, and then … nothing until I woke up with police all over the place.”
“Where did you have the drinks?”
“The library. I thought that was a little strange because Greg doesn’t usually let anybody in there with him, especially Jeremy and me.”
“His idea, this little gathering?”
“Yes. He insisted we be there at twelve thirty—he said he wanted to talk to us.”
“About?”
“Those damn missing books. But he didn’t really have much to say, just the same old baseless accusations.”
“Against your brother?”
“Yes. And that I must have known and was keeping quiet about it to protect Jeremy.”
“Were you?”
“No. I swear I don’t know what happened to those books. Neither did Jeremy. He called Greg a conniving old fool and told him he’d better watch out or he’d regret it.”
“Regret it how?”
Her gaze shifted to DiSantis, but she must not have gotten anything from him in return; she said to my right ear, “He didn’t say how.”
I said, “Look, Mrs. Pollexfen, if you want my help you’re going to have to confide in me and in your attorneys. Everything you know, nothing held back. Understood?”