“What does this coalition do, exactly?”
“Lobbies for legislation against electronic eavesdropping, that kind of stuff. Me, I don’t worry about it. I don’t put anything in e-mails that I don’t want the world to hear. I got one credit card, don’t buy off the Internet, guard my Social Security number like it was Fort Knox.”
“Did J.D. say why he was interested in the coalition?”
“Nope. He guarded his stories like I do my SSN. I’d pass on info to him, he’d give one of my causes a plug, and we were both satisfied. Say, did you see his piece on the Hapless League putting the dead rats in the mayor’s office?”
The Hapless League was an organization Lesser and his cohorts had formed to play practical jokes on city officials. “No, but I think I saw something about it in the
Chron.
”
“Well, you should check out J.D.’s version in
Salon.
You can say stuff on the Internet that you can’t in a so-called family newspaper. He reprinted the text of our note. Way cool. You wanta know what it said?”
Do I have a choice?
“ ‘We saved your life today. Killed a bunch of shit-eating rats.’ ”
Such eloquence.
Alana Andrews’s machine picked up. The message said she would be out of town for the next ten days. I didn’t bother to leave a message.
Jane Harris, J.D.’s landlady, sounded depressed. “I didn’t see him at all on Friday, but I heard him upstairs in the late afternoon, rumbling around like he was in a hurry. Then he rushed down the stairs, banged the door on the way out, and was gone.”
“Has the sheriff’s department been here?”
“First thing this morning. They searched the apartment and took a box of his things away with them.”
“So the apartment’s sealed now?”
“If you consider a little bit of plastic tape a seal.”
“Do you?”
“Look, Sharon, you’re talking to a seventy-three-year-old hippie. At my age I’ve learned to trust people over thirty, but I’ve still got my reservations about authority. You want to come over and have a look around, I’ll let you in.”
On my way to J.D.’s building on Waller Street in the Cole Valley district near U.C. Med Center, my cell phone rang. Although I’d had the phone for upwards of a year and a half, I still wasn’t sold on—or proficient at—using it while driving, so I pulled into a bus zone to answer.
“Sharon?” Jody Houston’s shaky voice.
I couldn’t mask my anger as I demanded, “Jody, where are you?”
“I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill J.D.”
“Where
are
you?”
“I came home from the grocery store and there was a strange car in the driveway. So I parked down the block and snuck back to the cottage and went around it looking in the windows. He was on the living room floor.”
“Why didn’t you call nine-eleven?”
“At first I was scared the person who killed him might still be in the house. Then when I realized they weren’t, I was scared the police wouldn’t believe me. I mean, it was my house, and I knew him.”
“You could’ve told me. I’d’ve handled it.” But would
I
have believed her?
“I know I should’ve, but when I went upstairs I looked out the window—”
Sudden silence.
“Jody? Jody?”
Only static on the line now. I looked at the digital display on the phone, saw the words “no service.” There are dozens of places in the city where wireless reception is spotty to nonexistent—and I was idling right smack in the middle of one.
I didn’t kill J.D.
I didn’t know whether to believe her or not, but I took out the card of the Tillamook County detective in charge of the case and reported Houston’s call.
Jane Harris was what I call an unreconstructed hippie: gray hair hanging down to her waist; dangly earrings and sandals and tie-dye. The odor of incense mingled with the smell of marijuana in her ground-floor apartment. Beanbag chairs, bead curtains, and Flower Power wallpaper were alive and thriving there.
I’d met Jane a few times at dinner parties at J.D.’s apartment, and over the course of our mostly one-sided conversations had learned her personal history. She’d been married to a minor Beat poet in the fifties, a minor rock musician in the sixties, a minor artist in the seventies, and in the eighties a major distributor of soft drinks who had died and left her well enough off to buy the building and become a benevolent landlord. Her rents, J.D. had told me, were proof that her favorite decade lived on in her heart.
And apparently it was a generous heart. As she waved me into her living room she continued a conversation on her cordless phone: “Now, don’t worry about a thing, honey. I’ll contact J.D.’s pastor”—she rolled her eyes at me—“and discuss the service. I’ll arrange for the flowers and get some ideas for places to hold the reception afterward. He had so many friends, we’ll need a good-sized space… . Right. By the time you and Mr. Smith arrive here, all you’ll have to do is choose.”
Half a minute later she ended the call and turned to me, sighing. “His poor mother. She’s so upset she can hardly think. He was an only child, you know.”
“What’s this about a pastor? I’ve never known him to set foot inside a church.”
“The parents are very religious. Doesn’t matter to him anymore, and if it’ll give the Smiths some comfort, I can handle a few white lies.”
“You’re a good friend, Jane.”
“Not all that good. Something was wrong with J.D.’s hot-water heater; he complained of a sulfuric smell. But I kept putting off calling the plumber because I’m budgeting toward a new roof. Now I feel terrible. The poor boy had to smell rotten eggs during his morning shower on the day he died.”
Regrets …
I was a neglectful landlady.
I hung up on him.
I thought about going up after Roger, taking him a bottle of Valentine’s Day wine… . Then I thought, the hell with it… . And the next morning there it was on the TV news… .
We were close. But apparently not as close as I thought.
There must’ve been signs. We could’ve helped Joey.
No, I wasn’t thinking at all. Not when it came to my brother.
The hell with regrets.
I said, “I’ll take a look at J.D.’s apartment now.”
Every time I’d visited J.D. I’d been impressed by how he managed to convey an aura of simple elegance with furnishings that for the most part he’d purchased at Cost Plus. Plain woven grass mats, canvas director’s chairs, rattan tables and bookcases were accented by colorful framed museum posters of art exhibits, and a jungle of tropical plants grew in the window bay. Interspersed were what he referred to as his “finds”—interesting junk, basically, that he cleaned up and displayed in unusual ways. Various engine parts, pieces of pipe, old tools and bottles all became treasures after his careful reclamation. I stood in the living room fingering a model of an airplane made from a spark plug, some sheet metal and wire, with the business end of a leather punch as its propeller. He’d often tried to give it to me, but I’d refused, thinking it was better off with its creator. Now I slipped it into my purse—something to remember him by.
I went down the short hallway to where two bedrooms flanked the bath. The one where he slept showed signs of a hurried departure: bed unmade, clothing—including the soaked yellow sweater that was the twin of the one in which he died—tossed on a chair, drawers left partially open. The office across the hall was equally untidy, with books strewn on the floor and papers mounded beside the computer. I sat down at the workstation and turned the machine on. It was a type I wasn’t familiar with, but I played around and finally accessed his recent files. None were of interest except for some notes he’d made Thursday night on our conference with Max Engstrom. It was titled “Bullshit 101.” He’d apparently had no time on Friday to record whatever had sent him to Oregon on a flight that the newscasts said had departed SFO two and a half hours before mine.
I shut off the machine and left the room. The apartment had a westward exposure, and the afternoon sun had begun to warm it. It still felt lived in, as if at any moment J.D. might walk through the door and ask, “What the hell’re you doing here, Shar?” But soon his parents would arrive, the memorial service would be held, and his home would be stripped bare, repainted, readied for new tenants. A few years from now few people would remember that a talented man who died before his time had once lived there.
I remained in the living room for a moment, trying to say my good-byes to his lingering presence, then turned toward the door. There was an old-fashioned wood-and-brass coat tree next to it, and J.D.’s raincoat, which he’d worn Friday morning, hung from it. I’d forgotten about mine up to now, had left it at
InSite,
but he must’ve gone back inside for his.
I took the coat down. It still felt damp in places. I stuck my hand into the left pocket, found nothing but lint. The right was full of pieces of paper. I removed them and stepped into the adjoining kitchen to examine them.
Receipt from Miranda’s for our Thursday morning breakfast; he’d insisted on buying. Parking ticket, weeks old and mangled. Business card of a personal shopper at Nordstrom’s. Folded sheet of yellow scratch paper.
I smoothed the sheet out on the counter and studied it: Circled names with arrows connecting them in multiple ways: Nagasawa, Houston, Remington, Engstrom, Vardon, Donovan, Chen. They formed an ellipsis, and the arrows crossed and crisscrossed in a confusing pattern. Below were words and abbreviations with question marks after them: Afton? Econ? CWP? ER? LR? TRG?
I stared at the diagram till the lines and circles blurred, finally shook my head. It had meant something to J.D.—but what?
As I was walking back to my car from J.D.’s building, I glanced up at Parnassus Heights where the U.C. Medical Center complex loomed, and thought of Harry Nagasawa. Roger’s brother interested me because, while he professed intense dislike of him, he’d apparently fallen apart in the aftermath of his suicide. Harry had terminated our interview very abruptly, and I was certain there was more I could learn from him, if I approached him in the right way. I decided to walk up the hill and see if he was on duty at the hospital.
It was windy on the Heights, and even on a Sunday afternoon Parnassus Street was clogged with buses, taxis, and other vehicles. Visitors streamed into the buff-colored hospital bearing flowers, plants, gift packages, and stuffed animals. I checked the directory, took the elevator to the cardiac care unit. A nurse with curly black hair hunched over a computer terminal behind the reception desk; when she turned to me I saw her eyes were tired.
“I’m looking for Dr. Harry Nagasawa,” I said. “Is he here today?”
Surprise animated her drawn features. “Dr. Nagasawa’s no longer on staff.”
So they’d caught on to his substance abuse. “When was he let go?”
“He was put on suspension in January, pending a disciplinary hearing, and offered his resignation a week later.”
“But—” What had he said when he arrived at the family home for his appointment with me last week?
I got tied up at the hospital.
“D’you know if he’s on staff someplace else now?”
“Sorry, no. Are you a patient?”
“An old friend. Can you tell me why he was suspended?”
She glanced around, obviously torn between hospital policy and the temptation to gossip. Leaned toward me and said in a low voice, “I don’t know all the details, but I believe it had to do with him accessing confidential patient records.”
“Patients other than his own, you mean.”
“Right. I’ve heard a couple of rumors. One is that he was altering the records. The other is that he was passing them on to another party. Either way, that’s a very sensitive area, and the board was happy to receive his resignation.”
I thought of what Roger had told Jody—that he’d forced someone to do something unethical, and the person’s career had been put in jeopardy.
Harry?
“Any way you can find out whose records they were?”
“If you’re his friend, why don’t you ask him?”
“I didn’t even know he wasn’t on staff any longer. I doubt he’ll want to talk about it.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but I can’t help you. As I said, it’s a very sensitive area, and nobody’s discussing it.”
Except the people who are floating those rumors—and you.
I left the hospital and crossed Parnassus to the parking garage, where I took the elevator down to Frederick Street at the base of the Heights. A roundabout walk back to my car would give me time to ponder this latest turn of events.
The governing board of the medical center hadn’t wanted to make public what Harry had been doing with confidential records, so they’d allowed him to resign quietly—so quietly that his own family members weren’t aware he was no longer on staff there. Easy enough for him to conceal: his mother was no longer living at home, and his father was preoccupied with his busy practice and the impending wrongful-death suit. Chances were he hadn’t been taken on by another hospital; the signs of substance abuse were so severe now that any health-care professional would have spotted them.
So what did Harry do with his days? Absent himself from the Cow Hollow house at the appropriate times, in case the housekeeper noticed his presence and called attention to it. But where did he go? The movies? A girlfriend’s home? The bars? How could he fill the time a resident’s busy schedule demanded? He was out of control, unsuited for any other vocation, or even avocation. Tomorrow I’d put an operative on the Nagasawa house—Julia could use some experience in surveillance—in order to find out where Harry went and get a handle on how to approach him.
I was halfway down the short block of Arguello Boulevard that runs between the medical center’s garage and Kezar Stadium—a restored 1925-vintage football field that now hosts high school games—when one of the row of Edwardian houses caught my eye. It had once been the home of my client and old friend Willie Whelan. Willie, a professional fence who had, as he put it, gone legit by establishing a chain of cut-rate jewelry stores, had caught the eye of a talent agent while doing his own over-the-top TV commercials. Now he lived in New York City, where he starred as an immensely popular villain on a soap opera. Rae, who had survived a fling with him during his days as “the diamond king,” taped the more amusing episodes and shared them with me.