The Motive (14 page)

The kick drum went
thud.

Glitsky continued. “After she gave me the dentist’s name, she talked about her family and money. Things are going to be better for them all after Paul’s death.”

“How much better?”

“A lot.”

Glitsky offered his opinion that Catherine’s ingenuous and offhand cataloguing of the benefits of Paul’s death mitigated considering her a suspect. So Cuneo would probably be well advised to stay away from her. If any further direct interrogation of her were necessary, Glitsky ought to do it. Cuneo didn’t buy the argument. But he wasn’t going to argue with the deputy chief, whose visit here had to be intimidation pure and simple.

Instead he said, “If it’s my case, how about if I work it and keep you informed?”

“We could do that, but it might be awkward for me with the mayor. She asked me to stay involved. I’m asking you how I can do that and still let you do your job.”

“I just told you. How about if I work it and let you know what I get?”

Glitsky put his notepad down. “I’ll ask you one more time. Either you tell me how you want to do this or I’ll tell you how we
will
do it. Is that about clear enough?”

After a minute, Cuneo nodded. “All right.” He got out his own notepad, flipped a few pages. “You said the mayor might know something she’s not telling you. Ask her what she really knows about Hanover.”

“All right.”

“Then you might see if you run across anything about Missy while you’re at it.”

“You think she might have been the primary target?”

“She’s just as dead as Hanover. And Catherine said the two of them had been fighting.”

“About the remodel? Catherine said…”

Cuneo interrupted. “Catherine, Catherine, Catherine.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I didn’t touch her.”

“I never said you did.”

A stretch of silence. Then Glitsky pulled a page of newspaper from inside his notebook, unfolded it and handed it across to Cuneo. “That’s Paul and Missy three months ago at a party. It’s the only picture of her I could find, which I thought was a little weird since Paul’s picture was in the paper every couple of weeks. The
Chron
’s even got a head shot of him on file. But nothing on her except this.”

“She didn’t like to have her picture taken.”

“Apparently not.”

“Why not?”

“No idea.”

Cuneo finally looked at the photograph. “Somebody looks like her, you’d think she’d love to get photographed.” He stared another second, emitted a low whistle. “Definite trophy material.” Still, he kept his eyes on the picture.

“You see something?” Glitsky asked.

Almost as though startled out of a reverie, he said, “No. Nothing. Just a hell of a waste.”

C
uneo left his house about a half hour after Glitsky had gone, and this put him in the city at around 3:30, long before his shift was scheduled to begin. But he figured he wasn’t going to be on the clock for a while anyway, not if he wanted to break this case before Glitsky could claim any credit for it.

The Arson Unit had for years worked out of one of the station houses close to downtown. But that station didn’t have toilets and changing areas for female firefighters, so to make room for these improvements, the Arson Unit had been transferred to its present location in a barricaded storage warehouse on Evans Street in the less-than-centrally-located, gang-infested Bayview District, far, far south of Market. Inside the cavernous main room downstairs they kept the arson van as well as spare engines and trucks and miles of hoses and other equipment. There was also the odd historical goody, such as an engine that had been used in the 1906 earthquake and fire, with an eight-hundred-pound, five-story ladder it had taken twenty men to lift.

Becker sat upstairs at a small conference table in a common room outside of his small office. When Cuneo entered, he was turning the oversize pages of some computer printout. Looking up, and without preamble, he said, “Valero gasoline.”

“What about it?”

“That’s the accelerant.” He tapped the pages in front of him. “We had a good-enough sample from the rug under her. We ran a mass spectrometer on it. Valero.”

Cuneo drew up a chair. “They’re different? I thought all gas was the same.”

“Not exactly.” He put a finger on the paper. “This was Valero’s formulation.”

“So what does that tell us?”

“Unfortunately, not a whole hell of a lot. Valero’s the biggest gas producer in the country. However—the good news—it’s nowhere near the market leader here in the city. And there’s a Valero station not three blocks from Alamo Square. Not that our man necessarily bought the gas there, but somebody bought almost exactly two gallons on Wednesday morning. The sales get automatically recorded and we checked.”

“Did anybody notice who bought it?”

“Nobody’s asked yet.”

Cuneo clucked. “I’ll go by. I’ve got a picture of Missy. Maybe it’ll spark something.” He pulled out his notepad, unfolded the picture and passed it across. “Can you say ‘babe’?”

Becker stared at it for a long moment. “This is Missy? She looks a little familiar.”

“You know, I thought that, too. You heard it
was
her, by the way, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. I called Strout, keeping up.”

Cuneo drummed on his chair for a few seconds, staring into the air between them. Suddenly he snapped his fingers. “That’s it. I knew there was something else. You just said something about ‘our man’ when you were telling me about the gas. You got anything that narrows it down to a guy?”

“No,” Becker said. “I’ve just always assumed it was a guy. I told this to Glitsky.”

“And what did he say?”

“Nothing, really. He just took it in. Why? Is something pointing you toward a woman?”

“Maybe,” Cuneo said. “I’ll let you know.”

Glitsky figured that if he didn’t want to ask the mayor directly, and he didn’t, then his best source of information on her perhaps-hidden connection to Paul Hanover was likely to be found in the basement of the
Chronicle
building at Fifth and Mission. Despite the receptionist calling Jeff Elliot to tell him Glitsky was upstairs wanting to see
him, when Glitsky got buzzed down and got to Jeff’s small, glass-enclosed cubicle, the reporter/columnist was in his wheelchair at his desk, typing up a storm at his computer terminal, apparently lost to the world until he suddenly stopped typing and looked over. “This is my Pulitzer,” he said. “You mind waiting for two more ’graphs?” He motioned to a chair just inside the cubicle.

Glitsky nodded and took the seat.

The office was small and cluttered. It sported an old metal desk that held Elliot’s computer and a telephone, a waist-high oak bookshelf crammed to overflowing, and another metal shelf contraption stacked with about a year’s worth of newspapers, and against which leaned a set of crutches. A bunch of
New Yorker
and other cartoons were taped on the glass wall by Glitsky’s head. Next to the phone on the desk was a picture of his wife with their daughters.

Elliot stopped typing and stared at his screen, then raised his right hand over the keyboard and brought it down with a triumphant flourish. The screen cleared. He turned his head toward Glitsky. “Sorry about that, but it’s brilliant. You’ll see tomorrow. So to what do I owe the personal appearance?”

“You said you wanted to talk to me, remember? About the picture of me and the mayor? The scoop I was hiding from you?”

“I was giving you grief, I think. Now you’re telling me there was one?”

“If there was, I thought maybe between us we might find it.”

Elliot pushed his wheelchair back from the desk and around to face him. “You’re losing me.”

“I don’t mean to. What do you know about Paul Hanover?”

“Other than the fact that he’s dead? This is going to have to do with the mayor?”

“It might. And we’re off the record, okay? It’ll be worth it in the long run.”

Elliot nodded with some reluctance. “All right. What do you have?”

“I don’t know if it’s anything, but you remember yesterday
at the Ferry Building when I told you I had business with Kathy. The business was that she had asked me to get involved, personally, with Hanover.”

“Why would she want you to do that?”

“That’s unclear. Maybe she thinks we’ve got a relationship.”

“So you’ll control what gets out?”

“I don’t want to think she thinks that.”

“But you suspect it?”

“Maybe that’s putting it too strongly. I know nothing about Hanover other than the fact that he gave her campaign money. I thought you might have heard a little more.”

Elliot took his hands off the armrests of his wheelchair and linked them on his lap. His eyes went to the cartoons on the partition by Glitsky’s head, but he wasn’t looking at them. Finally, he drew a breath and let it out. “First,” he said, “he didn’t just give her
some
money. He threw the fund-raising dinner that kicked off her campaign last summer, where they raised I think it was about six hundred grand. You might have read about that, since the story appeared in the general newspaper and not my column.” He grinned at his little joke. “But Hanover, I guess you’d say, was catholic in his political contributions. Kathy, of course, is a Dem, but he was also the Republican go-to guy.”

“When did we start allowing Republicans in San Francisco?”

“You’d be surprised. Last time the president came out here to raise some money, guess who hosted the party?”

“So what were his politics? Hanover’s.”

“He didn’t have politics so much, per se. He had clients. But wait a minute.” Jeff went back to his terminal, hit a few keys, then sat back in satisfaction. “There you go. When memory fails…”

Glitsky came forward in his chair. “What’d you get?”

Donnell White, a mid-thirties black man with an upbeat demeanor, managed the Valero station on Oak and Webster. He wasn’t the owner, but he worked afternoons six days a week. He took one look at Cuneo’s picture of Missy D’Amiens and nodded. “Yeah, she in here all the time, every week or two. She must live nearby.”

“Not anymore.” Cuneo told him the news, then went on. “But the question is whether you saw her come in on Wednesday and fill up a portable gas container.”

“Not if she come in the morning.” He looked down again at the picture, scratched his short stubble. “But hold on a sec.”

They were standing out in front by the gas islands, and now he turned and yelled back into the garage area, where some rap music emanated. “Jeffie, come on out here, will you?”

When there was no response, White disappeared back into the station. After a few seconds, the music stopped and White and Jeffie emerged back into the late-afternoon sun. Jeffie was young, as sullen as White was effusive. Apparently bored to death, his eyes rolled upward as he slouched with his hands in his pockets, listening to why the cop was here. Finally they got to the picture and he nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Could have been her.”

Something about the phrase struck Cuneo. “What do you mean, could have been? It either was or it wasn’t.”

He shrugged. “Hey, some woman get some gas.” He looked to his coworker. “Who you said you lookin’ for?”

Cuneo jumped in. “It might not have been this woman?”

He shrugged. “I’m eating lunch inside. She fills the thing and not her car. Put it in the trunk.”

“She put the portable container in her trunk?”

He fixed Cuneo with a flat stare. “What’d I just say, man? Yeah, she put the container in her trunk.”

“What kind of car was it?”

Again, the eye roll. “Maybe a Mercedes? I don’t know. Coulda been. Something like that.”

Cuneo held the photograph out again. “And would you say it was this woman or not?”

Jeffie looked more carefully this time, took it in his hands and brought it closer to his face. “I seen her…this woman, before, I think.” He kept looking. “Mighta been her, but if it was, she had her hair different. But I don’t really know, ’cept she was white and fine-lookin’. Big jugs, no fat. Nice butt.”

“You remember what she was wearing?”

The young mechanic cast his eyes to the sky again, then closed them. “Maybe a blue shirt, kind of shiny. Oh yeah,
and sunglasses. She never took the shades off.” He pointed at the picture again. “It could have been her, now I look at it. It’s hard to say. But maybe not.”