Power Slide (11 page)

“But I followed him here, to this corner on Saturday. He was going to meet me across the street the morning he died. I found his body.”

“Then he must have still had whatever it was you think he was going to give me, because I never saw my brother.”

“But he came here! That night, the day before his body was found. You had to—”

All of a sudden I saw things as she must have. “Omigod, I am so, so sorry. I can’t even imagine—so many years he was gone, and now to know he came back, he was right here on your doorstep and you missed him. He died without your seeing him at all! That’s so awful!” If Mike were dead and I had missed my one chance—No wonder she was so undone. Instinctively, impulsively, I reached out to her.

“Get away from me! I can’t go on with this. First he just leaves, leaves me to deal with everything. And now all this.”

I grabbed the door. “He grew up here, right?”

She looked terrified.

I didn’t care. “Let me see his room.”

“No! No, I’m not letting you in to see anything. Let go of my door.”

“Wait, I’m the only person you know who cared about him . . . Or maybe I’m not. Do you have sisters, other brothers? Are your parents still here? Other relatives? Who were his friends? Give me their names and I’ll leave you be. Or one, just one person to tell me about him. You’re his sister; you have to know someone!”

“People move.”

“But parents, sisters—”

“It was only us two.”

“Just one name! Now that I know he grew up here, I can check his yearbook and track down friends. My brother’s a cop so he’ll have resources, but that’ll all take time and—”

“Okay. Okay. Pernell Tancarro. I’ll call him. Wait here.”

I pulled my hand back just in time before she slammed the door.

A six-foot wall surrounded the grounds on both sides of the walk. I hoisted myself and peered over. The yard was a field of weeds. It looked like she hadn’t considered mowing since he’d left. As I lowered myself back down I shot a glance across the street and noted the patrol car waiting. In the back of my mind I’d planned on being invited inside, on taking tea and talking of Guthrie, holding my position till the patrol shift changed. Now I was going to have to come up with another escape route.

I moved closer to the street and hoisted myself high up on the fence on the other side of the walk. The yard on this side of the walk was a different world from the mess I’d just seen. It was a garden with potted geraniums and a camellia bush in the corner by the street. Surely there would be a gate in the back, leading somewhere. I leaned in, took my time peering toward the back. Let the cop wonder if I’d make my exit from the side or back. If he took the bait and drove around the corner, I could sprint across the street into the park and vanish—all perfectly legal. Or, if I could get Gabriella’s friend to let me go through the house or the yard somehow, better yet.

I dropped back down on the path.

A hand grabbed my shoulder.

“WHAT THE HELL are you doing?” A man pulled me off the fence from behind.

I turned, shoving free of his hands. I was expecting to be face to face with an enforcer, but what I found was a solid guy with dark hair gone gray around the temples and a pissed-off expression. “I’m trying to find out about Gabriella Guthrie’s brother.”

“Behind the fence?”

“Touché. Look, Guthrie was murdered across the street from her house and she’s carrying on like ‘so what?’”

“There’s plenty here besides her house—the park where he played as a kid, the temple pillars where grass, and who knows what all, was sold. There could be people on the next blocks he knew. Lots of connections beside a sister who hasn’t seen him since the earthquake.”

“If you’re Tancarro, you’re the only one she gave me. She said
you’d
tell me about him. How could he be here less than a day and end up dead?”

“I don’t know! Look, I’ve barely thought about anything else since I saw the police over there. I haven’t seen him in twenty years, and . . . He was gone for so long, he was nothing but a memory and then, suddenly, he’s here again, but dead. It’s unbelievable.” He stood, slowing shaking his head. “Tell me again who you are?”

“Darcy Lott. And you’re
Pernell Tancarro, the poet!
We read you in high school. I’ve been out of the loop a lot since, but I remember you’re a native San Franciscan, right?”

“Fourth generation.”

“And you’re still writing?”

He hesitated a moment. “My focus has changed. I enable others. On the board of the Arts Commission, the museum, the Palace of Fine Arts, of course. But about Damon, we were no more than friends of convenience, neighbor kids. There were years we’d barely nod in the street.”

“What about other friends—”

“Gone. Houses sold and resold. If I weren’t on the neighborhood committee, I’d hardly know anyone here but Gabi.”

“So, there’s no one for me to ask but you—or her. Look, I found him lying there with his nose smashed in and his head—” I had to swallow hard to keep from losing it.

He put a hand on my shoulder. “Sure. Of course I’ll tell you what I know, but just be prepared that it’s not much and definitely not recent.”

With that hand he was steering me along the path onto the sidewalk. Across the street the patrol officer started his engine—ready to hustle me down to headquarters to explain to Higgins? I moved a bit closer to my new friend, the neighborhood committeeman.

“Growing up, Gabi was smart, focused, hard-working—Little Miss Perfect. Damon was a fuckup.”

Was he talking about the same people? Gabriella was Little Miss Perfect? And Guthrie a fuckup? I would never have believed that before last Friday on the set. But now I had to wonder. “Like how? What was his most recent escapade?”

“Hmm. Well, the year before the quake, he and I, and a couple of other guys spent too much time in the bars on Union Street. We’d already carried out some pretty dark deeds.”

Dark deeds? What was this, high school?
“Such as?”

“One time we broke into a neighbor’s basement and lifted his porn collection.”

Junior high!
“And the guy went public?”

“Worse. We were in our late twenties—way too old for that kind of shit. He called my father. ‘This is San Francisco,’ he told him, ‘people don’t care about porn, but burglary—they care plenty.’”

“What about
Guthrie’s
father? What’d he—”

“Dead. Both parents. Died a couple years before. Car went off the road on Route 1 somewhere around Big Sur. Shot over the cliff. It was awful.”

“Omigod! Poor Guthrie!” Without thinking, I reached out for him.

“How’d he take it? I mean, was that the cause of this second adolescence?

That he couldn’t focus? Or did it—”

“Poor
Gabriella
! She just about fell apart. But him, no,” he said, in a tone of disgust. “Suddenly, he was totally focused. He had one goal and that was to get his inheritance. Their parents left Gabi in control of everything. The porn thing was probably just to embarrass her. He just about drove her crazy—well, the truth is he
did
drive her crazy. He called day and night till she never answered the phone at all. He’d bang on the door, peer in the windows, everything but pop up through the toilet. By the end of a year she was so undone she put those wretched bars on the basement windows, double-paned the rest of the windows, and walled off the fireplace. Paneled over it and the bookcases in the living room—pine paneling from a rec room in some tacky suburb. Then she got those blackout curtains. I told her the house is so dark at night, people’ll think it’s empty. But she’s beyond listening.”

“Why didn’t she call the police?”

“What, and sully the Guthrie name? Not likely. Her parents expected her to take care of her brother. Naught is so potent as the dictates of the dead!” He shrugged. “She’d never have gone public, not if it hurt the family image.”

Never do anything to hurt the family.
I sure knew that one. “Why didn’t you—”

“Hey, I do have my own life! Besides, I didn’t know what-all was going on back then.” He’d been walking slowly and now, at the corner, he paused. He had to live close by, but clearly he no more intended to invite me in than Gabriella had.

“I just can’t believe Guthrie was like that! You knew him years ago, and people change . . .” I was thinking aloud and Tancarro seemed fine with that. “And he did feel really guilty about something—”

“He had plenty to choose from. You saw Gabriella now. But you can’t imagine what she was like before. She used to be an up-and-coming attorney.”

“She was a
lawyer
?”

“Hotshot prosecutor. But you can’t lose your concentration in the courtroom. Now she doesn’t leave the house.”

“Ever? How does she live? Off the trust?”

“Right. If she hadn’t had that money . . . Now, no one goes inside there. Even I haven’t crossed the threshold in ten years.” He stopped in front of a yellow stucco house that looked like the loved cousin of Gabriella’s, and turned to face me. “Damon did a lousy thing.”

“He really did feel terrible. Maybe that’s why he was coming here. He talked about returning something.”

He slowed his pace. “What thing?”

“That’s
my
question. You knew him. What—”

Now he stopped dead.“Twenty years! He held onto something for twenty fucking years and then all of a sudden he’s got to return it? I mean, there is UPS. God, it’s so Damon.”

“But what could it be? Why? What got him killed?”

“I’m sorry, honestly.” He strode on, faster than before, as if to distance himself from his unseemly outburst. “I wish I knew the answer, for me as well as you. I’ll try to remember if there was anything, any
one
who might know. If I come up with—”

“What about those guys he hung out with on Union Street? Where are they?”

“They won’t remember. You’d be wasting your time.”

“It’s the one way you can help me. Our only lead. Who are they?”

He shrugged. “Okay, but—The guy Damon was closest to is Luke Kilmurray.”

“Where can I find him?”

“Thailand.”

“What’s he doing there?”

“Drugs.”

“How long’s he been there?”

“Years. I wouldn’t even know he
was
there if a friend hadn’t run into him on the street in Bangkok.”

“Do you have his number? Or an address?”

“I might.”

I could hear the patrol car behind us. “Do me a favor? Let me go through your house and out the back.”

He turned, looked at the patrol car, and for the first time he smiled. “The fast getaway, huh? You really are Damon’s friend.”

In two minutes I was in his kitchen by the back door, slip of paper in hand.

“It’s not a private number,” he said. “Luke’s landed in a strange situation over there. The time I tried, I called and they had to go find him and then he phoned back. You know, like it’s restricted usage or a hostel or something. It was such a hassle I only did it once.”

“I’ll deal. What about the other guy? Didn’t you say there were four of you in the bars?”

“Ryan Hammond? I have no idea where he is.”

“Will you check around?”

“I’ll let you know. And vice versa? Do me a favor, too? Let Gabriella alone. Call me if you need anything, okay? Damon could be a pain in the ass, but there were times when he was my friend. I don’t want some idiot to kill him and walk away free.”

Flights to L.A. aren’t quite like having the airlines call to ask you when it might be convenient for you to depart, but close. I got a seat on Southwest boarding in half an hour, which meant I just had time to call Thailand.

I found the quietest noisy spot, and punched in the number, hoping but not believing I would get through. Fuzz and crackle, squeaks and metallic scrapings suggested a squirrel racing along the wires.

“Anja Chak,” a female voice said.

Of course I didn’t know whether Anja Chak was a greeting, a person, or a place. Risking rudeness, I went with the straightforward. “Luke Kilmurray?”

The line crackled. She repeated his name, I think.

“Is he there?”

“Here? Yes.”

“Yes? Can I speak to him?”

“Oh, no. He will call back.”

“When?”

“Later. In daylight, yes?”

I took that question as a very polite way of saying, “It’s the middle of the night here.”

“When?” I insisted. But she’d already hung up.

I headed back to the boarding line. There was just time to call and leave an update on John’s machine—what I’d learned, not where I was headed.

With a stunt man there’s always someone who knows the skinny. I’d given Higgins Guthrie’s L.A. connections. She’d approach them sooner or later. When she did, she’d piss them off. But I would have gotten there first.