Nemesis (20 page)

“Personalized. G-W-A-Y-I-N-S. Some kind of lead there?”

“I don't know yet. Maybe.”

“Hank Avery. You see him?”

I told her about the minor dustup in his driveway.

“So he's a hot-headed dude,” she said.

“He is,” I said, “but more smoke than fire. One of those snarling types that show a yellow streak when push comes to shove. Not that that eliminates him. His mother says he was home with her when Daniels was killed, but that kind of alibi isn't worth much.”

“Ostrander?”

“He's out,” I said, and explained why.

“So we're down to Avery and Canaday. One of 'em better be guilty. Otherwise…”

Otherwise we'd have to start over, look elsewhere. And with little or nothing to point the way.

*   *   *

When I came off the Bay Bridge into San Francisco, it was nearly five o'clock. I swung back down to the Embarcadero and into the Bayfront Towers garage. The evening shift security guard, a crewcut blond with stoic features named Frank Krikowski, was the least unsympathetic of the ones I'd spoken to previously, but still reluctant to answer my questions.

“I told you before,” he said, “we're not supposed to discuss the residents. Particularly not Ms. Daniels.”

“The police instruct you not to talk about her?”

“No, but it's company policy.”

“Look, Jake Runyon has worked in law enforcement for more than twenty years. He's a good man, an honest man—I'd stake my life on his innocence. You can bend the rules a little to help me prove it, can't you?”

Krikowski studied me while he thought it over. Then he shrugged and said, “Up to a point, maybe. What do you want to know?”

“If Ms. Daniels had any visitors recently who looked like either of these two men.” I described Hank Avery, and Vincent Canaday from Runyon's report.

“The sandy-haired one, maybe,” Krikowski said. “But I see a lot of people every day. Most faces don't stick in my memory.”

“How about cars?”

“Not unless there's something real distinctive about it.”

“Battered brown Ford pickup with a scrape on one side?”

“Uh-uh. I'd remember a junker like that.”

“Tan four-door Chrysler Town and Country, two years old?”

“Pretty common model. No.”

“I don't suppose you keep a logbook list of license plates?”

“Not unless there's a reason to,” he said. “If a visitor is expected and we have the name, no. If it's a stranger calling unannounced on one of the residents, yes.”

“Along with the person's name?”

“That's right.”

“Could you check the book for a couple of names and numbers?”

“I suppose so. But why don't you just go up and talk to George Haxner on the lobby desk? All visitors, expected or not, have to sign in before they're admitted upstairs. No exceptions.”

“I'll do that. But I'd appreciate your logbook check first. Say for the past month or so.”

He checked. Neither Avery's nor Canaday's names and license plate numbers were listed.

I rode the visitors' elevator up to the lobby. George Haxner, dark and bulky, had the stern look of a prison guard at his post behind the security desk. I shared the opinion Runyon had expressed in his report: Bayfront Towers had more of an institutional feel than a place designed for comfortable urban living.

“You again,” Haxner said when I approached. “Now what?”

“Couple more questions.”

“Questions about what?”

“Whether or not Verity Daniels had visitors named Vincent Canaday or Hank Avery in the past few weeks. And if so, how often.”

“Canaday, Avery … who're they?”

“Men she used to know, maybe still knew.”

“Police never asked about either one.”

“They don't know about them yet.”

“But you do. Must be some detective.”

“Forty years in the business, public and private.”

“Almost twenty for me. I'm still not a genius.”

I let that pass.

Haxner said, “So why do you want to know if either of them visited Ms. Daniels?”

“If you could just take a look at the records—”

“Can't do it. I like my job too much.”

“No one has to know.”

“I'd know. You'd know. Maybe the police would find out. Uh-uh, no, sorry. There's nothing I can do to help you.”

 

21

Wednesday was a bust.

Vincent Canaday didn't show up at Gateway Insurance. “I'm sorry, he's not available today,” the woman I talked to on the phone said. I told her I'd been in the day before and asked if he was still under the weather. She didn't know, she hadn't spoken to him. She sounded a little nonplussed when she said that, an indication that he hadn't called in nor had she been able to reach him.

Tamara had both his home and cell numbers. A call to the cell got me an out-of-service message and an invitation to leave one of my own on his voice mail, which I ignored. An answering machine picked up at the home number. No message there, either.

Canaday seemed to have gone to ground for some reason. Maybe related to Verity Daniels's murder; the timing seemed to support a connection. But there could be several other explanations, among them that he really was ill. That would account for the fact Nancy Canaday, who had no job or profession outside her home, was also unavailable.

Tamara's contact at Great Western Maritime and Life came through as promised, but with little in the way of definite information. Five years ago, at the time Verity Daniels claimed he was working some sort of insurance scam, Canaday had been the subject of an internal review with regard to a pair of policies he'd written that the company considered to be “of an inappropriate nature.” He'd been reprimanded, but that was all: not enough evidence of deliberate wrongdoing for Great Western to terminate their relationship with him and Gateway Insurance. There was nothing in his file to indicate that they'd had any problems with him since.

Those two suspicious policies made me want a face-to-face with him all the more. But he still wasn't answering his cell, and I kept getting the home answering machine each time I tried that number. And there was nothing to be gained in driving over to the East Bay again unless I was sure I had a chance of getting to him. Frustrating.

At one o'clock I left the office to keep an appointment Tamara had made for me with Thomas Dragovich. More frustration. He'd been in touch with Figone and Samuels; the police investigation so far hadn't turned up anything that even slightly weakened the case against Jake Runyon. The only piece of new information had come from the Bayfront Towers security staff. Evidently Verity Daniels had had a habit of leaving early in the morning two or three days a week, at various times from six-thirty to eight o'clock, and returning at noon or early afternoon. She had also gone off for long periods on Saturday and Sunday, though not leaving as early as on weekdays. This had been going on for a couple of months. But nobody had any idea where she went or what she did during those absences.

A police search of her condo had revealed no links to anyone, male or female. Interviews with Bayfront residents had been equally unproductive. Most had never met or even seen her, and of those who had, only one, a man named Chad Weatherford, had exchanged more than a few words with her. Weatherford had admitted to meeting her in the basement garage one afternoon, sharing an elevator ride with her, and suggesting they have dinner together. She'd turned him down, claiming she was engaged to be married.

I said, “This Weatherford—who is he?”

“CEO of a local software company,” Dragovich said.

“Married?”

“No.”

“Know anything else about him?”

“No, but there's no reason not to believe his story. He volunteered the information about the dinner date turndown. I don't think we need to concern ourselves with him.”

When I got back to the agency, Tamara had a small piece of news for me. “Well, now we know why Canaday's wife hasn't been around to answer their home phone.”

“Oh? Why?”

“Doesn't live there anymore. Left him and filed for divorce a little over a month ago. Took their daughter with her, moved in with a sister in San Jose.”

“How did you find this out?”

Tamara let me see one of her sly little smiles. “Got my ways.”

The Internet, of course. The modern equivalent of Orwell's Big Brother, with the only difference being that anybody can access the vast storehouses of accumulated information. There's no privacy anymore, nothing sacred, no intimate details that can't be ferreted out through one source or another. It's a boon to our profession, sure, making detective work a lot easier than it used to be, but at times it makes me a little nervous about the future. And I find myself thinking of a Fredric Brown vignette I'd read once, in which all the cybernetic machines on all the populated planets in the universe are linked together to form a single super computer. The first question it's asked is the age-old one: Is there a God? And the super computer answers: Yes,
now
there is.…

“Hey,” Tamara said, “you just go into brainlock or something?”

“Senior moment.” I shook off the gloomy reflection, refocused. “What prompted Canaday's wife to walk out?”

“She's not talking, but it's gotta be money problems. Honey problems, too, I bet.”

“Other women?”

“Dude's like most men—never pass up an opportunity to have their knobs turned by somebody new. The marriage almost busted up once seven years ago over a woman. Not Verity Daniels, so she wasn't his first and only.”

Knobs turned. Right. Join forces with a streetwise twentysomething, get a liberal education in modern slanguage.

“Who was the woman seven years ago?”

“Nobody for us to bother with. Worked in an office near Gateway Insurance, came from Chicago and moved back there after the affair busted up.”

“Lengthy affair?”

“Few months. Not anywhere near as long as the one with Daniels.”

“So she must have been a lot more to Canaday than a bed partner. Daniels, I mean.”

“Probably did some kinky stuff between the sheets that kept him coming back,” Tamara said. “She was the type for sex games along with all the other ones she played.”

“Either that, or the relationship went beyond the physical.”

“For him, maybe. Not for a head case like her.”

“She had to be getting something out of it.”

“Besides orgasms? Big thrill because he was married and she could keep him dangling. Liar, manipulator, control freak.”

Despite Dragovich's comment that we needn't concern ourselves with Chad Weatherford, I asked Tamara to run a backgrounder on him. Transplanted San Franciscan, forty years old, single for the past ten years after a brief marriage. Considered one of the best men in his field of specialized software design; annual income upward of $500,000. Something of a swinger, his name romantically linked with a couple of women among the city's elite. No criminal record of any kind. Just your average rich, handsome, man-on-the-prowl-about-town—the type that considers all women fair game and hits on any reasonably attractive female he meets. Verity Daniels's turndown probably hadn't bothered him in the slightest; for every woman who said no, there'd be several who said yes.

“I can't stand guys like that,” Tamara said. “Think they're God's gift. Only thing they care about is their own dick.”

“You're too young to be so cynical, kiddo.”

“With my track record with men? Uh-uh.” For a few seconds she was broodingly silent. Then she muttered, “Damn that man!”

“Who? Weatherford?”

“Horace.”

“That's a name I haven't heard you mention in a while.”

“Thought I was done with him,” she said. “Why the hell couldn't he just stay in Philadelphia?”

“You mean he's back here?”

“Coming back, yeah. Called me up out of the blue last week. Lost his chair at the philharmonic, marriage busted up, got no place else to go. Better believe he's gonna try to mess with my life again.”

“Not if you don't let him.”

“Easier said than done. You don't know the man like I do.”

No, I didn't. But there was one thing I did know, not that I'd invite her anger by saying so: in spite of how much Horace had hurt her, she was still in love with him.

*   *   *

After dinner that evening, I sat tilted back in my recliner and read through the Verity Daniels case file again. Runyon's report, Tamara's various notes, the additions I'd made. Good time for study and reflection because it was quiet in the condo, Kerry working in her office, Emily closeted in her room with schoolwork, iPod, and Shameless the cat.

I didn't really expect to find anything I'd missed previously, and I didn't: all the facts were there, considered and acted upon. And yet when I was done I had one of those nagging feelings that I was overlooking something about Verity Daniels and that nasty, calculated flimflam of hers … something in Runyon's detailed report. I read the report again, still couldn't tell what it was. And again—and then I had it.

Baker Beach.

Lands End.

Why had Daniels picked those places for the two bogus rendezvous? Personal experience? She'd lived in the city long enough to have become familiar with both, except that she hadn't been the type to go exploring; couch potato, TV junkie. Selected at random, then, off a map of the city or out of a guidebook? Maybe. But there were other, more well-known public places with the necessary atmosphere and landmarks that would have served her purpose just as well—Golden Gate Park, Ocean Beach, the Marina Green, Coit Tower. Why Baker Beach? Why Lands End?