McCone and Friends (12 page)

Wolfgang Trujillo lived in a residential hotel on Nob Hill, close to downtown and the theater district. His living room was so full of books and magazines and playbills and newspaper clippings that there was only one place to sit—an old armchair with busted springs. He offered the chair to Lottie, and she perched on its edge.

I leaned against the sill of a painted-shut window that stared smack at the wall of the next building, and watched Mr. Trujillo pace around the room. He must’ve been in his seventies, tall and skinny, with a sunken chest and a wild mop of white hair, and he liked to wave his arms around while he talked.

“Mr. Homestead bought the Ingleside house on the advice of my former tenant, James Chaffee,” he said in response to Lottie’s first question. “I never met Homestead. The transaction was handled through Coldwell Banker.”

“The house was rented to Mr. Chaffee for how long?”

“Three, three and a half years before Mr. Homestead bought it. My wife had died, and I wanted to be closer to downtown, but I’d had difficulty selling, so I let it out instead.”

“What can you tell me about Mr. Chaffee?”

“He was a good tenant, kept the house and yard up. He installed an alarm system and didn’t ask for reimbursement. He paid his rent on a six-month basis, with a cashier’s check drawn on Wells Fargo Bank.”

“I suppose you ran a credit check on him before he took possession?”

Mr. Trujillo stopped pacing and gave Lottie a stern, somewhat astonished look. “Young woman, are you familiar with that neighborhood?”

“Uh, sort of.”

“Then you must be aware of the problems involved in owning property there. A house is very difficult to rent when drug dealers are camping on the front lawn, intimidating everyone who comes and goes. Mr. Chaffee gave me a cash deposit as soon as he looked at the place. He returned within the hour with a bank check for the balance. Frankly, I wouldn’t have cared if he had the credit rating of Saint Anthony.”

“Huh?”

“Patron saint of paupers,” I explained. I was raised Catholic, although most of it didn’t take.

“Oh.”

Lottie seemed thrown off her stride, so I questioned Mr. Trujillo. “Can you describe James Chaffee?”

“Certainly. He was around forty. Five-foot ten or thereabouts, slender build. He had blond hair that looked like a toupee, or maybe a wig. Very regular features.”

“Anything else? Facial hair? Distinguishing marks? So far, the description could’ve fit a lot of people.

Mr. Trujillo thought, staring up at the ceiling. “There was…Yes! He had a mole on his right earlobe. Quite a large one. I couldn’t help but stare at it, and that seemed to make him uncomfortable.”

As Lottie and I exchanged looks, the phone rang. Mr. Trujillo went to dig it out from behind a mound of clippings on the desk. He spoke with his back to us, then held out the receiver to me. “It’s your employer, Ms. McCone.”

How the hell had Shar known to call here? “So you’re one step ahead of me,” she said when I picked up.

“You found out about the house in Ingleside, and Mr. Trujillo?”

“Uh-huh. After you left I decided to run another background check on Homestead, in case the police missed something.”

“Were you messing around with my computer?” Shar’s only now becoming computer literate, and she doesn’t really know what she’s doing. Besides, nobody but me touches my office computer or laptop.

“It’s the agency’s machine, Mick.”

And that was that. She wasn’t going to tell me how she came up with the information. Sometimes I think the only reason she resists technology is to bother me.

I decided to one-up her. “Well, Lottie and I have found out that at the time his wife disappeared, Homestead was renting the Ingleside house under an assumed name. Here’s what I think happened: Old Harry had arranged to meet Susan someplace other than the Saint Francis that day. After all, we’ve only got his word about their lunch date. She thought he was gonna take her to meet his mother, who was living in what she called horrible circumstances.”

“In a house held siege by drug dealers.”

“Right. He took Susan there, whacked her, hid the body—maybe in a freezer. Then he activated the alarm system he’d had installed and went to the Saint Francis, where he made sure the staff saw him. And then he put on his act for the people he called and the cops.”

“So the body’s been in the house for all seven years?”

“Protected by the alarm system. For added insurance, Harry bought the place after enough time had gone by that the cops had back-burnered Susan’s disappearance. If he’s visited since, he’s been real careful.”

Shar didn’t say anything. Sometimes those silences of hers unnerve me. “So do we go to the cops with this?” I asked.

“I think you’re right about what happened,” she said, “but it’ll appear an iffy scenario at best to the police. And there’d be nothing they could do. No judge would issue a search warrant without probable cause. We’ll have to see if we can get Homestead to visit the house again—in front of the right witness.”

Shar spent the next morning in conference with Susan Cross’s attorney, an inspector from the SFPD homicide detail, and a representative of Bay Alarm; I spent the afternoon at the florist’s.

Not just any florist, mind you, but Sylvester Piazza, arranger to the glitterati. His fancy shop on Post Street was chock-full of flowers and plants that I’d never seen before, and every customer who came in dropped more bucks than I spend on rent each month. Sylvester himself was a hoot, as Lottie would say: a tubby little guy with thinning blow-dried hair. He scurried around his workroom in his black velvet jumpsuit, plucking a blossom from here, a piece of greenery from there, and mumbling about what an honor it was to be asked to replicate Susan Cross’s masterpiece. La cross—he actually called her that—had been a divine floral “artiste.”

I sat on a stool and watched as he consulted the color photo of Susan’s prize-winning arrangement that her lawyer had given us, and wondered why I’m always the one who gets the weird assignments at McCone Investigations. Sylvester arranged happily, humming opera and occasionally bursting into song. Finally he stepped back and eyeballed his work, nodded, and announced, “Now for the piece de resistance!” He went to one of his glass cases and rustled through the flowers stored there. Suddenly he stopped, clutched his heart, and let out a strangled howl.

I was off the stool right away, thinking he was having some sort of attack. As he doubled over, I rushed to steady him. “What’s wrong?”

“The
Strelitzia
!” he sobbed.

A fatal disease? Some body part gone out of whack? “Say what?”

“Bird of paradise! It’s the focal point of the arrangement, what gives it it’s meaning! And I have none! One of my dunderheaded assistants must have used it!”

“If that’s the problem, my dad has one of those plants that he brought back from Hawaii—”

“No, you imbecile, I’m talking about the giant bird of paradise!
Strelitzia nicolai
. The bananalike leaves, the purple floral envelope! Without it, this arrangement is nothing! Even if I could locate a proper plant, getting the cuttings here on time would be impossible.”

“Can’t you substitute—”

Sylvester’s face scrunched up and got red, and he shrieked, “Substitute?”

Right then Lottie breezed in. “Shar sent me to—what’s his problem?”

“No Strelitzia. I’ll let him explain.” I went outside and took a walk over to Union Square. The most zoned-out homeless guy there looked normal after old Sylvester.

When I got back to the florist’s shop, Lottie was on the phone, and Sylvester lay on the floor doing deep-breathing exercises. “Bird of paradise,” Lottie was saying. “No, the giant variety…You don’t? Well, thanks anyways.” She hung up and gave me the evil eye. “While you’ve been out I’ve called thirty-three florists. Seems the giant bird of paradise is in short supply.”

“So use something else.”

Sylvester moaned dramatically. Lottie rolled her eyes. “He says the arrangement won’t look right, and that’ll ruin the effect.” She consulted a list, picked up the receiver again and punched in a number.

Till then I’d never realized how much like Shar she is. Single-minded and stubborn in the extreme. I watched as she went through the whole list without turning up any giant
Strelitzia
. Then she grabbed one of Sylvester’s reference books and stuck her nose into it. “There’s got to be something,” she muttered.

You’d think she’d give up. Wouldn’t you?