G
regory Pollexfen sounded pleased to hear from me when I called him Wednesday morning. “You have something to report, I hope?”
“Not yet, no.”
“Well, it’s early in your investigation. What did you think of Angelina?”
“Very attractive woman,” I said carefully.
“On the outside. Did you track down Jeremy?”
“We had a talk.”
“Arrogant bastard, isn’t he? Guilty as sin.”
“I don’t have enough information yet to make that kind of judgment.”
“Meaning you still think I could be guilty.”
“I won’t lie to you, Mr. Pollexfen. From my perspective you’re as likely a candidate as anyone else in your household.”
“I’m not offended,” he said. “You’re cautious and thorough—I admire that kind of detective work.”
“I’d like to come by again, if you don’t mind. Another chat, another look at your library.”
“Would you? When?”
“At your convenience.”
“Well, I have some work to do and there’s a book auction at Pacific Rim Gallery I’m planning to attend this afternoon. Some rare Edwardian items I don’t have in my collection. Would you be available late afternoon?”
“If it’s not too late.”
“Excellent. I’ll check my schedule and call you back.”
Tamara had been busy at her desk when I came in. Now she appeared in the doorway linking our offices. “Well, that’s a relief,” she said.
“What is?”
“He’s not married.”
“Who’s not?”
“Lucas Zeller.”
It took me a couple of seconds to identify the name. “The man you, ah …”
“Right. Never been married. Lives with his mother, just like he said.”
“Checking up? He give you reason not to trust him?”
“Man’s kind of closed off, you know? Doesn’t like to talk about his job or himself, but he’ll give you a tenminute riff on his mama.”
“And you thought maybe Mama was his wife, not his mother?”
“Occurred to me, so I decided to check. No big deal,
just curious. I mean, he’s a lover, not a marriage candidate.”
“Clean bill, eh?”
“Pretty clean, yeah. Works for Dale Electronics over in El Cerrito, been with them twelve years. He and Mama live in the Marina.”
“So you’re satisfied now?”
“Yep. Man’s good for my bed as long as it lasts.”
Modern young women. Outspoken about their sex lives. Don’t worry too much about having an affair with a married man as long as he doesn’t try to hide the fact from them. Don’t see anything wrong in checking up on a lover, invading his privacy on the sly, to put their minds at ease.
There were times when the chaotic, permissive new world we live in seemed a little too much for a man of my old-school sensibilities. Inexplicable, too, in so many ways. Not to mention infuriating and depressing when the larger issues—insupportable wars, terrorism, rampant political chicanery, global warming, vicious anti-gay and anti-immigrant sentiments—came into play. It worried me sometimes, how out of touch and inadequate the modern world made me feel. Born a generation too late, past my prime, and too old and too set in my ways to make the necessary adaptations to connect with the evergrowing mess of changes and challenges.
Well, the hell with it. I’d made it a lifelong policy not to judge others’ behavior or attitudes or lifestyles or political or religious beliefs, so why start now? And what did I have to complain about, anyway, when you got right down to it? I was still good at my now part-time job, a pretty fair
husband and father, reasonably healthy and happy and content. There were a lot of people, whole nations of people, who were the real victims of the new millennium.
Pollexfen called back inside of fifteen minutes. “Would four this afternoon work for you?”
“Fine.”
“Excellent. I’ll send Brenda to the auction early and join her there after I finish with another matter. It shouldn’t last past three, but if it does, I’ll send Brenda to meet you and let you in. You won’t mind waiting a bit if one of us isn’t there right at four?”
“I’m used to it.”
“Yes, I imagine a real-life detective would be. Mystery book sleuths all seem to have infinite patience.”
“Mine’s not infinite. Not even close.”
He laughed. “Four or shortly after, then.”
Strange bird, Pollexfen. I couldn’t quite get a handle on him. His wife and brother-in-law were odd, too, but I had a better idea of who they were and what motivated them. Pollexfen was all shadows and smoke. His intimates kept calling him a manipulator and I had the same feeling about him. But what I couldn’t figure out was exactly who and what he was manipulating, and for what purpose.
I
pulled up in front of the Pollexfen home in Sea Cliff a few minutes early. I hate to be late for appointments, so as usual I overcompensated. At the curb ahead of me was a sleek silver Jaguar sedan; in the upslanted driveway, a new, dark red Porsche Boxster. I went up and rang the bell. No
answer. Uh-huh. Back to the car, where I sat waiting and trying not to look at my watch.
Brenda Koehler arrived at eight minutes past four, driving a dark blue Buick. She parked behind me, and when we were both out and facing each other, she said, “Mr. Pollexfen is still at Pacific Rim.” She looked and sounded a little harried, a little breathless, as if she’d run instead of driven from downtown. “There was one last lot he wanted to bid on. He should be here shortly.”
“No problem.”
“That’s Jeremy’s Porsche in the driveway,” she said. “And Mrs. Pollexfen’s Jaguar. Didn’t you ring the bell?”
“Twice. Nobody answered.”
“That’s odd. If they’re here, why wouldn’t they answer?”
“Maybe they saw me and don’t want to talk to me.” Or, hell, maybe they were both drunk. Only four o’clock, but cocktail hour came early to that pair—very early.
The front door was locked. Brenda Koehler used her key, and we went into a cool, gloomy hush. In the front parlor, she asked me if I’d like something to drink.
I said, “No, thanks. But I wouldn’t mind talking to either Mrs. Pollexfen or her brother, if you’d tell them I’m here.”
“Certainly.”
Away she went, and I moved over to stare out through the tall front windows. Gray outside—a wall of fog that obliterated ocean, bay, and all except the upper towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. The fog created a murky halflight that made the room seem even gloomier than the closed-in foyer.
Brenda Koehler was gone five minutes or more. When she came back she was wearing a puzzled frown. “I can’t find them anywhere,” she said.
“Neither one?”
“No. I wonder—”
There were sounds at the front door, footsteps and thumps on the tile floor, and Gregory Pollexfen hobbled in blowing on his free hand and looking ruddy-faced and much healthier than the last time I’d seen him. He said hello to me, pumped my hand, allowed as how it was cold outside, and then said to his secretary, “I see that Angelina and Jeremy are both here.”
“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t find them.”
“What’s that? Are you sure?”
“I looked everywhere.”
His expression changed, darkened. “Everywhere? Did you check to see if the library door is locked?”
“No, I didn’t think—”
“That’s right, you didn’t think.”
I said, “I rang the bell when I first got here. If they’d gotten into the library, wouldn’t it have alerted them?”
Pollexfen said, “No. The walls are thick—you can’t always hear the bell with the door shut. Come on, we’d better have a look.”
The three of us went into the central hallway, moving single file with Pollexfen in the lead, when the blast came from the rear of the house. Flat, percussive noise, like a muffled thunderclap, that jerked us to a halt for three or four beats.
Gunshot.
Large-caliber weapon, rifle or shotgun. I’d heard guns go off too often in my life, in too many different circumstances, not to recognize the distinction.
I cut around Pollexfen and broke into a run. He said something I didn’t listen to, came clumping after me. I didn’t bother looking into any of the rooms that opened off the hallway. The shot had come from inside the library. I knew that instinctively, without even having to think about it.
The library door was locked tight. I rattled the knob, beat on the panel with the heel of my hand. Silence from within. Pollexfen was beside me by then; he said, “My key,” and when I turned toward him he shoved it into my hand. I jammed it into the upper lock, turned the bolt, yanked the key out, almost dropped the damn thing before I got it into the second lock and threw that bolt. It seemed to take minutes instead of seconds until I was able to shove the door open.
A wave of burned-powder stink rolled out at me. I plowed ahead, inside, sweeping the room, and then pulled up short with gorge rising into my throat. Behind me Pollexfen said, “Oh my God!” and Brenda Koehler let out a strangled little squeak, gagged, and spun and ran away somewhere with her heels clicking on the tiles.
Bad. As bad as it gets.
Angelina Pollexfen lay on the carpet in front of the desk—alive, her head rocking slowly from side to side, her eyes rolled up, little bubbling noises coming out of her. On the couch was a stack of books that had been pulled from the library shelves, seven or eight of them. Jeremy
Cullrane sprawled supine on the floor in front of the fireplace, what was left of his head resting on the hearth, the Parker twelve-gauge shotgun that had been hung above the mantel now lying half across his bent left leg. One barrel in the face at point-blank range. Blood and brain matter and bone fragments and blackened buckshot fouled the inside of the fireplace, the hearth, the carpet. The force of the blast had splattered more blood onto the books on the lower shelves to either side; it gleamed an evil crimson on the Mylar dust jacket protectors, clashing with the gaudy colors of the jacket spines.
I quit looking at Cullrane, swallowed against the rise of bile, and went to kneel by the woman’s side. Conscious, but disoriented; her eyes still rolled up, the whites showing like pudding dribbled with flecks of blood. I’d have to get her out of here right away. No telling what she might do to contaminate the crime scene when she regained her senses.
Pollexfen said in a sick voice, “She killed him. Angelina … Jesus, she blew his head off. Why? Why?”
Yeah. Why?
T
he team of homicide inspectors who responded to Pollexfen’s 911 call was reflective of both the changes in the SFPD’s gender policies and the city’s ethnic diversity. Senior officer: Linda Yin, a forty-plus, no-nonsense Asian woman. Her partner: Sam Davis, an African-American man ten years younger, heavyset and quiet, newly promoted from the way he deferred to Yin. Both seemed tired, a little stressed, a little short-tempered. Working an extended 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. tour, probably, and stuck with this late squeal that would mean even more overtime. I didn’t know either of them and they didn’t know me. But when I dropped Jack Logan’s name, it bought me a certain measure of respect. Jack and I go way back to the days when we were both rookies fresh out of the police academy; he’d climbed the ladder the long, hard way to his present position of assistant chief.
While Yin and Davis and the forensics technicians
worked in the library, Pollexfen and I sat in the front parlor waiting for the inspectors to get around to us. Angelina Pollexfen was in a spare bedroom downstairs, where I’d carried her and locked her in—a precaution that hadn’t been necessary; she was still only semiconscious when the law arrived. A matron and a police doctor were with her now. Brenda Koehler, sick and pale, had gone upstairs to lie down in another spare bedroom.
Pollexfen kept rubbing his hands together, a dry, brittle sound that scraped on my nerves. I wasn’t feeling too well myself. Delayed reaction. A bloody homicide like the one I’d just walked in on always leaves me feeling queasy, tight-chested, depressed.
He said for the third or fourth time, “They were stealing more of my collection. Both of them working together. Did you see that pile of books on the couch?”
“I saw it.” The one on top, I remembered now, was
The Talking Clock
by a writer whose name I knew from the pulps, Frank Gruber.
“Bold as you please,” Pollexfen said. “You must have been right about a key made from a wax impression. There’s no other way they could have gotten in.”
If that was the case, the key would be on Cullrane’s body or in Angelina Pollexfen’s purse. No pockets in what she was wearing—something else I’d noted and had already mentioned to Pollexfen. I sat silently with my teeth clamped together, listening to the scrape, scrape of his hands.
“Why were they still in there?” he said. “They must have heard Brenda calling them.”
Not necessarily. They evidently hadn’t heard the doorbell.
“But why did she shoot him? An argument? You think that’s it?”
“I’d rather not speculate.”
“Deliberate? An accident?”
I didn’t say anything.
“They must have been arguing,” Pollexfen said. “One of them took the shotgun down—a threat. They struggled over it and it went off accidentally … you think that’s the way it happened?”
“Your wife says she didn’t do it, Mr. Pollexfen.”
That came from Linda Yin, who had appeared in the doorway with Davis behind her. The two of them came into the parlor. “She’s conscious now. Lucid enough to make some sense.”
“Of course she’d say that. She’s never admitted to a wrongdoing in her life.”
“She says the last thing she remembers is having drinks with you and her brother over the noon hour.”
Pollexfen blew noisily through his nose. “We had drinks, yes. The three of us. But she was fine when I left for the auction.”
“What time was that?” Yin asked.
“Shortly after one.”
“She and Mr. Cullrane both here then?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think they were doing in your library?”
“Stealing more of my books. That’s obvious.”
“
More
of your books?”
“Eight of my most valuable first editions disappeared two weeks ago. I filed a police report, for all the good it did. They got away with those so it made them bold enough to go after more.”
“How much value are we talking about?”
“Half a million dollars for the missing eight volumes.”
Davis blinked at the figure; Yin showed no reaction. She said, “Insured?”
“In that amount. Eventually I had no choice but to put in a claim with my insurance company.” Pollexfen gestured my way again. “That’s why he’s here. He’s investigating the claim for Great Western Insurance.”
Yin asked me, “Find out anything we should know?”
“Nothing conclusive,” I said. “No sign of the missing books, nothing definite to point to the thief or thieves.”
“My wife and her brother,” Pollexfen said, “working in cahoots. That’s obvious, too, now. I didn’t think it was possible for either of them to get into the library—you’ve seen that all the windows are barred, and I have the only key to the door locks—but they found a way.”
“Loose key in the victim’s pocket,” Davis said. He had a raspy smoker’s voice. “It fits the locks.”
“Made from a wax impression, probably.” Pollexfen directed a grudging look my way. “Somehow one or the other of them must have gotten access to my key just long enough.”
Yin said, “You say they were here when you left at one o’clock, nobody else in the house. Why do you suppose it took them three hours to go into the library?”
“I have no idea. You’ll have to ask Angelina.”
“What do you think happened in there?”
“The shooting? We were just talking about that. She shot him, on purpose or by accident—what else could it be? They were alone in a locked room.”
“Premeditated?”
“I don’t know, but I doubt it. Angelina can be cold-blooded, but not that cold-blooded. She wouldn’t have the gumption. Most likely they had some sort of fallingout, one or the other pulled the shotgun off the wall, there was a struggle, and the weapon discharged.”
“All of that with you and two other people in the house.”
“The library walls are thick enough to act as partial soundproofing,” Pollexfen said. “From inside you can’t hear what’s going on in other parts of the house unless you’re listening closely and sometimes not even then.”
Davis said, “It could’ve been suicide. Looks like the barrel was in his mouth or close to it when the gun went off.”
“That could have been a result of the struggle.”
“If he had his mouth open at the time.”
“Suicide is out of the question, Inspector. You didn’t know my brother-in-law. The man was incapable of selfdestruction. He was the most self-involved, narcissistic person I’ve ever known.”
“Sounds like the two of you didn’t get along.”
“We didn’t. It’s no secret.”
“The shotgun belongs to you, is that right?” Yin asked.
“Inherited from my father.”
“Kept it mounted on the wall above the fireplace?”
“Yes.”
“Loaded?”
“Yes.”
“Why keep a loaded weapon on display?”
“I really have no answer to that question,” Pollexfen said. “My father always kept it loaded and I saw no reason not to do the same. The library is my domain. No one is allowed in there without my being present, and I’ve never permitted anyone to touch the Parker.”
“Pretty large weapon for a woman to handle.”
“Not for Angelina. She’s fired it before, accurately. We used to go bird hunting together.”
Yin seemed satisfied on that point. “Tell us again what you saw and heard.”
“I didn’t see anything,” Pollexfen said. “Or hear anything except the shot when the three of us were in the hallway.”
“And you could tell that the report came from the library?”
“It couldn’t have come from anywhere else. We were on our way there when it happened. Angelina and Jeremy weren’t anywhere else in the house—clearly they had to be in the library.”
“The door was secured?”
“Double-locked, as always. The locks can be keyed from both sides.”
“One key for the pair?”
“Yes.”
“Who opened the locks? You?”
“I did,” I said.
“My hands were shaking too badly,” Pollexfen said.
She asked me, “You were the first into the room?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Pollexfen go in, too?”
“No farther than the doorway,” he said.
“What about Brenda Koehler?”
“No,” I said. “She ran off to be sick.”
“Did you touch the victim or the weapon or anything else in there?”
“Only Mrs. Pollexfen. She was on the floor, moaning. Looked like she was suffering from shock.”
“Blowing a man’s head off would shock anybody,” Pollexfen said.
“So you picked her up and carried her into the spare bedroom.”
“While Mr. Pollexfen went to call nine-eleven, yes. Seemed like the best thing to do to make sure the crime scene wasn’t compromised. Then I went back and locked the library doors again.”
“Still have the key?”
I did and I gave it to her. She put it into an evidence bag, handed the bag to her partner, then the two of them went out into the hallway for a brief, whispered conference. Davis disappeared in the direction of the library. Yin stayed put, raised a beckoning hand toward me. “Come on outside for a minute.”
I went out with her onto the front terrace. The street below was teeming with police vehicles and uniformed officers, the coroner’s ambulance, a couple of TV remote crews, and the usual knot of neighbors and other gawkers. The thick fog and cold wind coming through the Gate
didn’t seem to be bothering them, but it chilled me in five seconds flat.
Yin gave the scene below a sour look and turned her back to it. “You have anything to add to what you told us earlier, what was said inside just now?”
“No. I’ve told you everything I know.”
“You arrived a little before four, saw the Porsche in the driveway, figured somebody was home, and rang the bell. Right?”
“Right. No answer, so I waited in my car. Brenda Koehler showed up a few minutes past four and we went in together. She said the Jag down there belonged to Mrs. Pollexfen and the Porsche to Cullrane, so they were both home. I asked her to find the two of them—”
“Why?”
“Talk to them again. I interviewed both yesterday and I wasn’t satisfied with the answers I got about the stolen books.”
“Meaning you thought one or both might be guilty?”
“Not exactly. I wasn’t satisfied with Pollexfen’s answers, either. That’s why I arranged to come here today—another talk with him.”
“Why weren’t you satisfied?”
“Well, only the three of them, and Brenda Koehler, had any kind of ready access to the library. One had to be responsible, but I couldn’t get a handle on which. Or the motive behind the theft.”
“Money. Half a million dollars.”
“Not if Pollexfen took the books himself. He doesn’t need to try pulling off an insurance fraud—not even for
half a million. We did enough checking to be reasonably certain of that.”
“Then why would he pretend to steal his own books?”
“Like I said, I don’t have any idea. Just a feeling that he may not have been completely honest with me.”
“Does he get along with his wife?”
“No. One big unhappy family.”
“Reasons?”
“Lots of them. Complicated. You’d better ask Pollexfen.”
“I will.”
“Anyway, I guess I was wrong about him. Victim, not perpetrator, assuming his wife and brother-in-law are guilty.”
“Assuming? Doubts about that, too?”
“Some,” I admitted. “Unfounded, maybe.”
“Let me be the judge of that.”
“Well, Cullrane and Mrs. Pollexfen didn’t like each other. Each of them made that plain. I can’t quite picture them plotting a theft together.”
“The dislike could have been an act.”
“Could have, but I don’t think so. Pollexfen confirmed that they didn’t get along. So did the checking we did.”
“A large sum of money can make partners out of enemies,” Yin observed.
“Sure. I know it.”
“You still don’t sound convinced.”
I shrugged. “There’s one other possible explanation for what happened today.”
“And that is?”
“Cullrane was alone, stealing more first editions, and
Mrs. Pollexfen came home and caught him in the act. But a couple of things argue against it. One, Pollexfen told me she never went near the library.”
“She might have today,” Yin said, “for the same reason you rang the bell. Saw her brother’s car in the driveway and couldn’t find him anywhere else in the house.”