Murder on the House: A Haunted Home Renovation Mystery (Haunted Home Repair Mystery) (25 page)

Chapter Twenty-one

A
man crept in, quietly closing the door behind him.

Somehow in all our stakeout antics we hadn’t factored in the possibility of actually capturing anyone. Luz was the first one up, standing in a single, soundless move. Using the wall between the foyer and the kitchen as a screen, she held the EMF detector up as if it were a gun, and flipped on the lights.

“Hold it!”

The man froze, thrusting his hands in the air. “Don’t shoot!”

Once it was clear he wasn’t armed, we all crept out from behind the wall. Luz stood tall, EMF detector held out in front of her. Stephen and I tried to follow her confident lead and flanked her. Luz was of average height, just a tad shorter than I, and slim to the point of skinny. Stephen was, well, Stephen. I had more body mass and muscle than either of my companions, but the man before us, though small of stature, had the ropy, hard muscles common to construction sites. Somehow I couldn’t imagine him quailing at the sight of any of us.

On the other hand, Luz had an in-your-face attitude she’d used to claw her way out of the neighborhood she grew up in. She wasn’t scared of anything human.

“What in holy
hell
do you think you’re doing?” Luz began, going on to say something clearly threatening in Spanish. She was speaking too quickly for me to follow with my rudimentary language skills, but her tone of voice was enough to get the gist.

The man looked young, probably no more than twenty years old. He stood with his hands thrust in the air, his chin quivering, and he seemed like he was about to cry. He started to shake all over, then started speaking rapidly in Spanish to Luz.

“English, please,” demanded Luz. “I want my friends to hear whatever lame-ass excuse you’re coming up with.”

“I’m sorry, I’m—I just wanted to get my tools. My things. Not to steal anything. Just my things.”

“At this hour?” Luz said, glancing at me.

Though my heart was still pounding, I finally found my voice. “Were you on the construction crew, then? With Avery Builders?”

“Yes, construction. Avery Builders. Who are you?”

“No importa,”
snapped Luz. “It doesn’t matter. We’re asking the questions here.”

“
Este
 . . . Mrs. Burghart is not here?”

“Valerie? No. Why? Are you here to see her?”

“No! This is why I come like this, when she is gone. She hates me. She took my tools. And then she called
la migra
on me.”

“Valerie called immigration?”

He nodded.

“Why would she do that? Are you . . . ?”

“I have my green card. I am legal! But she does not want to pay for work I did in the kitchen, right here—these cabinets.” His hands were still in the air, but he gestured to the cherry built-in with his head. “She drew plans herself, told me what wood to use. I buy supplies and make them exactly as she wants. But when I install them, she say they are not big enough for serving trays. This is not my fault, I do not know about her serving trays, I say her. I cannot redo without more money. But then she tells Avery I must be fired. Plus, she keeps my tools.”

Valerie wasn’t my favorite person, but this was ridiculous. Keeping a construction worker’s tools threatened his livelihood. And then calling in Immigration and Customs Enforcement, otherwise known as ICE? A very low blow. ICE had broad powers of authority; they were much freer than the police to detain people without charge, for instance, and yet they moved at the glacial speed of the typical bureaucracy. Once a person was detained, it sometimes took months or even years to resolve the legal issues. Not to mention money.

Sad to say, the young man’s story had the ring of truth to it; I remembered Valerie going on about the cabinets herself last time I was here. And I would imagine he was the owner of the tools hidden in the locked wine cellar.

“Listen, I am Ignacio Gutierrez, but everyone calls me Nacho,” he said, his tone ingratiating. “Please put down the gun. Really, I am not here to hurt anyone, or to steal anything.”

Luz lowered the EMF detector, but kept her stink-eye on him.

“Are you responsible for the strange things happening here on the job? The damage to the dining room table, the clothes taken out of the closet and spilled on?” I asked.

“Got to hand it to you, Nacho,” muttered Luz, “that bit was particularly inspired.”

“My friends on the crew, they were angry. It was wrong, they know this now; I have spoken to them, telling them we must pay her back for the table. They were also angry at Avery because he has not been paying proper overtime, so they wanted him to pay for the table. But I say if we pay a little each month, each of us, we can make that right. But then the kid was hurt—”

“That was
you
?” I said, any compassion I had been feeling immediately replaced by fury.

“It was an accident! I’m a father myself. I would never hurt a kid.” He licked his lips and looked nervously at Luz, who had once again raised the EMF detector in his direction. “Caleb is a good boy, very nice. He has nothing to do with this. That piece of the toilet was set there to fall off and break on the stairs, not to hurt anybody. They were just trying to make Mrs. Burghart unhappy.”

“Look, I don’t blame you for being angry, but my son was seriously hurt. And it could have been much worse. There’s no excuse for that.”

Luz launched into another long, rapid-fire tirade in Spanish. Nacho answered, his tone passionate. They lost me after the initial sentences, though I did understand Luz threatening to call her sister, the cop. Luz’s sister was low on the police totem pole, a rookie who was mostly assigned to crowd control, but Nacho didn’t have to know that.

I took a deep breath to calm myself, and noticed that Nacho had started shaking again. He looked so young. Just a few years older than Caleb, really, but already with a family of his own to support. What Valerie had done, if true, was reprehensible and demonstrated her lack of understanding of what it was like to work for a living. And there was something in his voice . . . I believed him when he said he hadn’t hurt Caleb on purpose, and that he was trying to undo what he—or his friends—had done.

I glanced at Stephen, who had remained quiet throughout this exchange. He was good at reading people. He gave a subtle nod, indicating he believed Nacho, as well.

“Tell me about Avery,” I said. “What do you mean he wasn’t compensating you properly?”

“Before, I worked for Thomas Avery, who understands more. I don’ like this Josh as much. He only sits in his fancy office, never comes to work with us. I think maybe he doesn’t understand how it works when you are on the job.”

That was a standard complaint of workers toward their bosses. It wasn’t the way I ran my business, but it wasn’t criminal behavior.

“Wait,” he said, picking up on my interest. “I . . . I can tell you a secret about Josh Avery.”

“We really don’t care if he’s got a secret love child stashed somewhere,” snapped Luz.

“What? No, nothing like that. But he’s not who he says he is. He isn’t really Thomas’s nephew.”

“What are you talking about? Then who is he?”

“I don’t really know. I hear this from one of my friends, Chewy.”

“Chewy? How could I get in touch with him?”

“I . . . I don’ know. I could find out.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll make you a deal. If Caleb backs up your story, and you agree to contact this Chewy fellow and get him to talk to me about Avery, I’ll let you go.”

“You not gonna charge me?”

I met Luz’s eyes. She raised her eyebrows and gave me a strange twist of the mouth and inclination of the head.

“Show us your ID,” Luz said. “I’m going to give my sister, the
policía
, all your information, and you come up at all, for anything, your ass is mine.”

He swallowed, hard, and handed over his wallet so Luz could write down all the pertinent information. Then we marched him down to Caleb’s room, and my stepson vouched for him and corroborated the parts of the story about Valerie he knew. We helped Nacho collect his tools—they were marked with his name—and brought them out to his truck.

“I will call you, I promise. Chewy will talk to you about Josh Avery.” His eyes flicked over all of us. “Thank you, thank you so much. And, Caleb, I’m so sorry for what happened to you.”

“Ah, it’s whatever,” Caleb said with a shrug. “I’m gonna come up with a good story to tell the girls.”

Nacho looked a little confused, but smiled. “Okay, then. Thank you again. I will call you, Mel.”

We stood and watched the taillights of his truck, speeding down the quiet residential street.

“You suppose there’s any chance he’ll actually call me?”

“Nah,” said Luz.

“Probably not,” said Stephen.

“Still, maybe I really should have my sister follow up, just to keep him on his toes. He seems a little arrogant for someone named after snack food.”

I gave her a look. “Really? You’re going to go there?”

“Love the cultural sensitivity,” said Stephen.

“Cultural sensitivity’s for outsiders. I’m Latina, so I get to say whatever I want.”

“Is that true?” Stephen asked me.

I glanced down at the EMF reader she still clutched in her hand. “As long as she’s holding that deadly weapon, I guess whatever she says goes.”

* * *

After the excitement of our impromptu stakeout, I was relieved to see my bed and get some much-needed sleep. The next morning I met with some prospective clients in Sausalito, and then headed over to the California Historical Society on Mission. I was eager to research Anabelle’s family to see if I could learn any pertinent information. Olivier was right, I should have done my historical research on the house, first thing.

I’d been through this drill before, so I pulled the file on the address, looking up blueprints, newspaper clippings, tax rolls. Anything I could get my hands on.

The original builders of the house were Franklin and Elizabeth Bowles. They built the house in 1902. Bowles came from money, but became truly wealthy when he set up a waterworks for the rapidly growing—and thirsty—city of San Francisco. A man of science, he was a physician and built the house to live in as well as to serve as a maternity hospital. It was one of the first of its kind in all of northern California.

“I remember that story,” said Trish Landres, who had become a friend over the years. Trish was the very picture of a librarian, with her reading glasses on a beaded chain, short-cropped no-nonsense hair, and wool cardigan. But I happened to know that underneath that staid exterior was a rebel who loved salsa dancing, believed passionately in the cause of certain Latin American countries, and regularly brought medical supplies to Cuba with a group called Pastors for Peace.

“You really are amazing,” I said. “Do you know the story of
every
old family in San Francisco?”

“Of course,” she said with a grin. “No, seriously, I remember the scandals, mostly. This story was huge for the Castro. The Bowles Water Works was wildly successful and financed his innovative maternity hospital until this other fellow bought the acreage up the hill, and siphoned off the water. Let me see. . . .”

She went back behind the reference counter and started tapping on her computer keyboard. “Uh-huh . . . uh-huh . . . not that . . . ,” she muttered under her breath, tilting her head back to see through the lower lens of her bifocals.

“Aha!” she cried out in victory.

“Did you find it?”

“It’s still on microfiche.” She looked around to be sure that the handful of patrons were taken care of by the other librarian on duty. “Kai, I’m going in the back for a few.”

She headed through a door marked
EMPLOYEES ONLY
and gestured for me to follow. I love all libraries, but especially adore the back rooms like this: stuffy and musty, shelves crammed with papers and ephemera that hadn’t made it onto computers yet. This was where you felt the history, a sensation impossible to get from a scanned picture on a computer screen.

“I didn’t realize you still kept microfiche,” I said. “I thought everything would be computerized by now.”

“Funny story, that,” Trish said as she stood on a step stool and started pawing through cardboard boxes sitting high on a metal storage shelf. “We started converting our whole collection over to computer, scanning in documents and entering the information for easy accessibility. Problem was, halfway through the project our funding was cut, and we couldn’t afford to staff computer experts to make sure the data wasn’t lost.
Here
it is.” She yanked a box off the shelf, which released with a puff of dust. She sneezed.

“Gesundheit,” I said. “Here, hand it to me.”

“Thanks,” she replied with a sniff. “So anyway, at that point we stopped scanning in the microfiche, but luckily we have the old machines, and they still work perfectly well. All they needed were new lightbulbs. Our budget covers that, at least. Just barely.”

I put the heavy box on the desk with a thump.

“I always wish I could earmark my tax dollars to pay for things like libraries,” I said. “And fire departments.”

“Good idea,” she said with a smile. “Want to know the worst part? Turns out, since we didn’t have the resources to keep updating the computer programs, now that data is hard to get at.”

“You mean lost?”

“I certainly hope not. Some of us are pretty committed to keeping hard copies, so there’s always that. And I don’t think the data’s irretrievable for someone who knows what they’re doing, just for us mere mortals who simply want to look up a historical document.”

“I thought computers were supposed to make our lives easier.”

“Ironic, isn’t it?” she asked as she rummaged through the little rectangular boxes within the larger crate. “It’s great to have searchable databases, of course, that sort of thing. And it’s a wonderful service to let people do research remotely. But there are definite drawbacks to the information revolution.”

I was enough of a Luddite to be secretly pleased when I heard about computer conversions failing, or mucking things up much worse than when they were on paper. What can I say? I like old stuff. As I told Caleb ad nauseam, real live books, the old-fashioned kind that you hold in your hand, never run out of battery or have their hard drives fail. Heck, drop a book in the bath and once it dries out, it is still readable. Try that with an e-reader.