15th Affair (11 page)

“Lindsay, I wasn’t sure when you’d be home.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said to Mrs. Rose. “The day got away from me.”

“Not a problem. I made a roast—”

“I love you,” I blurted.

“I love you, too,” she said. She opened her arms and hugged me and she told me to go see my daughter. “She’s really chatting up a storm.”

She brought a glass of wine into the baby’s room and I rocked Julie and stared out the window and told myself that I was fine, I just needed to sleep.

By nine, Julie and I were alone. She said, “Story,” and it was a demand, not a request. Joe had taught her that word. I took her and Martha into bed with me and told Julie the story of finding Martha at a border collie rescue league.

“We fell in love at first sight, didn’t we, Boo?”

Martha barked and Julie laughed, and I had a few laughs myself. First time in a few days, that’s for sure.

I intended to return Julie to her crib in just a few moments, but she woke me around three with the little distressed cry that usually precedes a meltdown.

“Sweetie, sweetie, Mommy’s here.”

Where was Daddy? Where was Joe?

CLAIRE WAS RAGING
as she left Metropolitan Hospital.

It was definite. Dr. Marshall had lost Michael Chan’s body. Her earlier statement, “I’ll call you,” had been amended to “Damned if I know what happened to him,” and a moment later escalated to “I’m starting to wonder if we actually had Mr. Chan, or if we just had his wallet in a plastic bag.”

“So where’s his wallet?” Claire had asked.

“Damned if I know. Look, I haven’t slept in three days.”

It was Saturday morning and Lindsay wasn’t answering her phone, and Claire didn’t want to wake her.

Still.

Claire got into her car and called again, and this time Lindsay picked up.

“What time is it?” Lindsay asked with a scratchy voice.

“Quarter to eleven,” Claire said. “You’re asleep. I’ll make it quick. Michael Chan’s body is still missing and Metropolitan has stopped looking for him. This isn’t over until I have his body in my morgue.”

“Never mind,” Lindsay said to her. “They tried.”

“They
tried
? What’s wrong with you, Lindsay?” Claire said.

“Nothing. Everything’s fine,” Lindsay told her.

“Joe? He’s come home?”

“Nope. He’ll turn up.”

Claire said, “OK,” hung up, and started her car. It was time to do something about this weird and unhealthy state of affairs. She called Cindy and Yuki, and by the time she arrived at Lindsay’s address, both of them were waiting for her in Cindy’s car.

Claire knocked on the window.

“Ready?”

“You betcha,” said Cindy. “It’s a good day for an intervention.”

The three of them, carrying shopping bags, went to the doorway of Lake Street and Twelfth, and Claire pressed the buzzer. When Lindsay answered the intercom to say, “No one’s home,” Claire shouted, “It’s me, lazybones. Open up.”

The buzzer sounded and Claire, Cindy, and Yuki entered the old residential building and climbed the wide stairs to the third floor, and Claire rang the bell.

Barking preceded the clacking of locks and the opening of the door.

“Claire, what? Can’t I sleep in once in a while?” Then Lindsay saw the rest of the gang and threw the door open. Claire saw that Lindsay was wearing maternity pajamas and gave her a questioning look.

“No, I’m not expecting,” she said. “This is all I have that’s clean.”

Martha danced, the baby cried from somewhere inside, and Lindsay said, “Just so you know, I’m not leaving this apartment until Monday. I might not leave then.”

“Agreed,” said Claire. “Time for us to all have a good visit.”

“We got sandwiches and cookies. Also coffee,” said Yuki.

Cindy said, “Linds, just so you know. Anything anyone says here is off the record. Even if you know who really shot Kennedy. Even if you know the location of the Holy Grail.”

Lindsay laughed and Yuki got the baby out of her crib and handed her to her mom.

“Lindsay, sit your ass down,” said Claire. “Let the feast begin.”

When the four best friends had gathered around the finger food on the coffee table, Claire announced, “Now that we’re all settled in, Lindsay, let’s have it. When was the last time you saw Joe?”

IF CLAIRE HAD
called first, I would have said, “Thanks, but no way. I’m going to sleep in, all day long.”

But she didn’t ask, and without warning or my permission, my well-earned deep funk was shattered by Yuki’s infectious laughter, Claire’s bossy mothering, and Cindy’s genuine joie de vivre.

Plus food.

Julie loved a crowd and was super-glad of the company. I put her in her bouncy chair about five feet from the action and Martha curled up at my feet, so it was all girls and all good. Correction, it was great.

Claire said, “Time to work, Linds. When did you last see Joe? When did you last hear from him?”

“And what do you think is going on?” Cindy added. “No matter how bad this is, you know we’re not going to judge.”

“We just want to clear up the mystery,” said Yuki. “We need to know what we’re dealing with, am I right?”

Yuki, her legal mind at work, asked for a calendar of events. So I started from the beginning and proceeded in chronological order.

I started with the remarkable fact that Joe hadn’t come home Monday night but had been snoring beside me on Tuesday morning. I told them he’d been perfectly fine—in fact, romantic. He’d made breakfast for me and Julie Anne, and I’d left him home with her as I ran out to work.

I said, “Monday was the day of the shootings at the Four Seasons. Rich and I were consumed with it. We got an ID on Michael Chan the next day and went out to see his widow.”

My friends were nodding, saying “Uh-huh, uh-huh” and encouraging me to keep talking.

I said, “I spoke to Joe on Tuesday while Rich and I were driving Shirley Chan back to the Hall. Late that night, I reviewed the surveillance video from our van we had sitting on the Chan house from across the street. He was on that tape.

“Wait, I’ll show you.”

I woke up my laptop, and as the girls stood around me, I showed them the clip of Joe stopping his car on Waverley and staring directly into the SFPD’s dedicated spy cam. And I told them about Richie picking out a guy in the hotel’s lobby footage who looked like Joe.

“Joe’s face on that tape—that’s the last I’ve seen of him.”

A lot of questions came at me from my clever, mystery-solving friends, but they were questions I couldn’t answer.

“Here’s what I think,” said Cindy. “He’s involved in this, Lindsay. I don’t mean in a bad way, but his drive-by in Palo Alto can’t be a coincidence.”

“I don’t know, Cindy,” I said. “I agree it means something, but we may not know all the angles.”

“Meaning?”

“He’s a consultant. He knows everything about port security. He could be working some kind of hush-hush job. He might be prohibited from contacting me. Maybe phones are being hacked.”

“Did you call the people he works for?”

“I would if I knew who they were.”

Cindy was undeterred.

“So keep going with your ticktock,” she said.

“OK, OK.”

I told the girls about the mysterious blond woman who’d been seen entering Chan’s room at the Four Seasons. Cindy jumped in, saying, “I posted her picture on our site and got a tip.”

“The next day,” I said, throwing my hands into the air, “before we could follow up—”

Claire finished my sentence: “The crash of WW 888.”

I said, “That night when I got home, Mrs. Rose said I had just missed Joe. He’d been home to change his clothes. He left me a message saying he’d been pulled into the plane crash nightmare, and, like, don’t wait up.”

“So he’s definitely
alive
,” said Yuki. “He’s not
hurt
. He’s
working
.”

“That’s what he said.”

I believed what I was saying, but damn it, it was weird that Joe couldn’t get in touch at all. Actually, it was inexplicable. When our lunch was over and the last of my friends were gone, I bathed Julie, gave her some applesauce, and called Joe.

“I’m sorry,” said the mechanical voice, “but the subscriber’s mailbox is full. Good-bye.”

Honestly? This was killing me.

I SPENT THE
rest of the day doing laundry, and by dinnertime I was hungry and bored. I took Julie across the hall to Mrs. Rose, saying, “I’ll be right back,” and headed out to our local Asian grocery store.

It was dark when I got down to the street. I was considering what kind of veg I wanted to go with last night’s pot roast when something happened—a shock or a blow.

All I knew for sure was that my face was on the pavement so fast that I never got my hands down to break my fall. Had I tripped? Had I had a stroke?

My head throbbed and my vision was distorted, but I made out the shapes around me as
shoes
.

Lights flashed, headlights zooming past. Nothing made sense. I wanted to throw up. I had struggled up to my hands and knees when I took a blow to my side and was down again. I rolled into a ball and covered my eyes, and heard two voices, maybe more, speaking to me in heavily accented English.

I looked through my fingers and saw four blurry Asian faces looking down at me. I thought I recognized the one who had confronted me in front of the ME’s office. Same guy who slammed into me after the NTSB press conference.

He was wearing black, and he had a wide face, and he was shouting at me, something like “You know Chan?”

Was I making that up?

“
Back off,
” I said. “I’m a cop.”

I reached for my gun at my hip, but it wasn’t there. There was another shout—“Who you work for?”

“What? Get away from me.”

I took another blow to the back of my head, and when I woke up, I was in an ambulance moving at high speed. The EMT at my side was saying, “Welcome back. What’s your name?”

I called Conklin from the ambulance and, shouting painfully over the sirens, I asked him to call Mrs. Rose.

Right after that, I was wheeled into the ER. My clothes were removed and stuffed into a plastic bag. A nurse took my blood pressure and temperature and layered on two blankets. Eventually a Dr. DiDonato appeared.

He checked me out.

“On a scale of one to ten, with ten being excruciating, how do you feel?”

“I feel like someone beat me up.”

“You remember that?”

“Vividly.”

“Have you ever had a CT scan before?”

“No.”

“Well, get ready for a new experience. I’ll let you know how your head looks, and then we’re going to keep you here overnight for observation.”

“I left my one-year-old with a neighbor. Someone needs to look for witnesses.”

“I’m on duty until eleven,” DiDonato said. “Dr. Santos will take over after that. Maybe he’ll release you in the morning.”

Conklin arrived while I was waiting for my CT scan. He looked both scared and mad.

“What happened? You were mugged? You?”

“I was beaten up by four Asian guys, but I’m alive. I wasn’t robbed,” I said, waggling the ring finger of my left hand with its sparkling array of diamonds.

“So why were you beaten? What did they want?”

“Something about Chan, I think. I can’t swear, Richie. It happened too fast. Why me? I’ve got no idea,” I said.

AT AROUND EIGHT
the next morning, Rich wheeled me out of the hospital, helped me into his Bronco, and strapped me in.

Then he let me have it.

“You’re overtired. You could have been killed. You have nothing on the guys who beat you—nothing. No names, vague descriptions, and you didn’t get a lick in. You know what that tells me, Linds? That you’re off your game. It’s Sunday. Day of rest and you should take it. Go to bed and stay there. I can handle this by myself.”

I wasn’t having it.

“What am I going to do at home, Rich? Watch the plane crash over and over again on TV?”

“That. And sleep.”

“Look. I admit I was stupid, OK? I should have had my piece with me. I should have had my head on straight. But I repeat. I was just going to the store for a minute. And, by the way, I outrank you. You don’t get to bench me.”

“You want Brady to put you on medical? Because I have him on speed dial,” said my partner, my brother, my backup, my comrade, my friend. When I didn’t answer immediately, he said, “You need to listen to me. Stay home.”

“No way.”

I held on to his arm as he helped me into my apartment building’s creaky elevator. Mrs. Rose opened the front door and told us to hush. “Julie is sleeping.”

“Can you stay? I have to go to work,” I said.

Rich gave me a scalding look, but Mrs. Rose didn’t catch it. She stepped up once again, saying, “Of course, Lindsay. At this rate I’ll be able to retire to the South of France pretty soon.”

“Before you retire, I’m promoting you to captain of the Emergency Baby Care Squad.”

“Fine. I’d like a salute,” she said. “No one’s ever saluted me before.”

I did it and she laughed so hard that I laughed, too.

Which really hurt.

While she made coffee, I hit the rain box. I examined myself as I stood under the spray. I was bruised from armpit to knee, from midriff to halfway around my back. But I had no internal injuries and my brain was OK, too. Thank God. I concluded that the four Asian hoods hadn’t tried to kill me. If it was a warning, they might work me over again.

I dressed, hiding the scrape along my jaw and cheek with makeup, and strapped on my gun. Locked and loaded, I went back out to the living room. Julie was awake, wearing a sunflower-yellow onesie and bobbing up and down in her bouncy chair.