Treasure Hunt (2 page)

“Ahh.” So that’s what this was. Mickey had read all about it over the past few months, but hadn’t realized that it was coming to a head so soon. Now the whole story came back to him.

The city had approved a $22 million restoration for the Palace and its grounds, and part of that project included buttressing the remainder of the shoreline of the lagoon, most of which was already bounded by a low rock-and-concrete wall. But the rest of the shoreline, closest in toward the Palace itself, had become degraded over time—in the past year alone, a couple of kids had fallen in when the banks had collapsed under them. It wasn’t so much dangerous as it opened the city to possible litigation issues, and so the supervisors had given the plan the green light, and put up $7.5 million to get the project started. The rest would, somehow, be funded by private benefactors. And lo, it had come to pass.

But to do any of this work, first the lagoon had to be drained.

Enter the ducks. And the San Francisco Palace Duck Coalition. And a former Berkeley tree sitter who, for the present campaign, had adopted the nom de guerre of Eric Canard. Mickey only now came to recognize the man in his camo gear. Usually he did photo ops in a full duck suit.

The Palace ducks, of course, along with its swans, herons, seagulls, and other birds, called the lagoon home. And if the lagoon were drained, Canard had argued to the Board of Supervisors, they would become homeless. Temporarily, but truly. And in a city that prided itself on being a haven to the homeless, this was simply unacceptable.

So the supervisors, caving in—to widespread derision in the media and on the street—had set about finding a solution to the problem. In spite of the fact that San Francisco had several nice and completely serviceable ponds, those ponds had their own populations of ducks whose environments, Canard argued, would be compromised by the wholesale relocation of the Palace ducks to their own home waters. So, eventually, the decision was made to relocate the ducks to Foster City, a residential community with Venice-like canals, and few permanent resident ducks, twenty miles south down the Peninsula.

This would have been a workable, though of course still wildly foolish, idea except for one thing: Six months before, Foster City had encountered its own problem with its indigenous ground squirrel population. These animals were burrowing in the city’s levees and destroying them, threatening homes with the very real possibility of imminent flooding. In response to this crisis, Foster City had decided to poison the levee-dwelling critters en masse. This slaughter passed largely unnoticed in Foster City itself, but did not escape the keen eye of Eric Canard. And when San Francisco announced its intention to remove its Palace ducks to Foster City, Canard had gone ballistic.

Surely, if the ducks were sent to Foster City, the heartless bureaucrats there would not treasure and protect them. These people had shown their true colors around the plight of defenseless animals and would obviously treat the ducks as they had treated their own squirrels if given half a chance. And Canard was not going to let that happen.

So he’d sued. And lost.

And had threatened to sue again. Which gave the city a window in which to make its move.

Across the street, the chant was wearing down, but Mickey could still hear a strong voice—undoubtedly Canard—yelling now at the lead cop.

“So how’d this start today?” Mickey asked the old man. “I thought it was still in the courts.”

“No. The brains down at City Hall decided they’d just go ahead and round up the birds. The whole thing is nuts. And it’s all moot anyway. They started draining the lake a couple of days ago before they were ready for the ducks—in secret, I might add, and that’s never a good idea—so word got out to Canard and his people that something was happening down here, and the whack jobs started gathering before sunrise this morning. Uh-oh.”

Off in the distance, the sound of sirens, police reinforcements on the way. Another news van pulled in, screeching to a stop.

The way this thing was developing, Mickey thought the story had a good chance to go national.

But Mickey had to get home, cleaned up, and to work. So he thanked the older man for his company, said good- bye, and crossed the street about a half block north of the crowd. Turning right, still hugging the shoreline, he followed it around to where it veered away from the view of the crowd.

Here the lower water level of the lagoon was much more obvious than it was up by the demonstration. The clumpy roots of the cattails shone black with the gunky bottom mud in the morning light. The low-hanging tree branches, which normally kissed the water’s surface, now looked trimmed off a foot and a half or so above the waterline. An asphalt pathway came down to the water’s edge off the parking lot, and Mickey took it as the shortcut back to where he’d parked.

But he hadn’t gone more than a couple of steps when one of the tree roots sticking up from the brackish water stopped him in his tracks. It was funny the way these things growing wild in nature could so closely resemble shapes you’d expect to find in other species, in animals, even in people. Those roots, emerging from the water, could easily, he thought, be the hand of a man.

In fact, it seemed so near a resemblance that he forced himself to step off the pathway and look closer. He came right down now to the water’s edge, where from this vantage he could dimly make out, six or eight inches under the water, an all-too-recognizable shape.

As Mickey stared in dawning belief, suddenly the water seemed to move and a trail of bubbles rose out from underneath the submerged form, turning it over and raising what was now clearly a body until its head broke the water’s surface and the dead man’s eyeless face stared up at him, caught and silenced in midscream.

 

 

 

 

At ten minutes past noon,
Mickey walked up the single flight of stairs that led from the Grant Street entrance, in the heart of Chinatown, to the front door of his workplace, a private investigations firm called the Hunt Club.

Although the word
firm
was a bit of a misnomer, especially lately.

Six months before, the business had been successfully humming along in pretty much the same circumstances it had enjoyed for the first six and a half years of its existence. At that time, the owner—Wyatt Hunt—didn’t seem to have too much trouble keeping himself and his two-and-a-half-person staff busy most of the time, working primarily for several of the city’s well-heeled law firms.

Mickey’s sister, Tamara, had held down the front-desk duties and often did light field- and interrogation work, especially when women witnesses or children were involved. A junior associate—Tamara’s old boyfriend Craig Chiurco—had done the lion’s share of the legwork locating witnesses, serving subpoenas, accompanying clients to depositions, and performing the other standard grunt work that made up the business.

Mickey, in addition to occasional subpoena service to the Hunt Club, had mostly driven a cab for a living, but was pretty much on call full-time to supply transportation to Wyatt or Craig should they need it, as they often did. In a city where parking was always so problematic, access to immediate transportation turned out to be a highly valued and oft-used service.

Wyatt Hunt himself was the computer whiz and the basic brains behind the organization. A natural- born marketer, Hunt also pulled in the actual jobs that kept everyone busy.

Until recently anyway. When bad luck, withering publicity over one huge failed case, a faltering economy, and possibly some questionable judgment had created a perfect storm that was threatening to shipwreck the enterprise.

Tamara had simply walked away from her job and had fallen into a profound funk from which she’d still not emerged. And with the exception of piecemeal work with the law firm Freeman, Farrell, Hardy & Roake, where Hunt had several close friends and one girlfriend—the business had all but evaporated.

Mickey, though, had not only stayed on with Hunt, he’d given up his more lucrative daily work in the cab business, quit most of his cooking classes, and taken over his sister’s position at the front desk. He did this because Wyatt Hunt was not just a good boss. Hunt had literally saved the lives of both Mickey and Tamara when they’d been children.

So Mickey wasn’t going to abandon Hunt. He’d stick it out until the job dried up and blew away. Or until it resurrected itself. Either way, Mickey was on board for the duration. He was still young, just twenty-seven. His own plans—to become a chef and open a world-class restaurant—could wait, since, like most American men his age, he was going to live forever.

Mickey the dutiful had, of course, called from the Marina three hours ago at the minute he’d realized he was going to be late for work, and had told the answering machine some of the story, but he’d of necessity left out a lot of it.

His discovery of the body had stolen the thunder from the demonstration. As soon as he’d run over and contacted one of the policemen on the scene, the television vans and a good portion of the crowd had swarmed to the other end of the lagoon to see the corpse in the water.

Now he let himself in to the Hunt Club’s two- room office. A chair scraped in the back, and Wyatt Hunt appeared in the adjoining door on his right, just beyond the receptionist’s desk. Tall and casually buffed, Hunt was dressed in slacks, a blue shirt, and darker blue tie. His sport coat, Mickey knew, would be hanging over his chair in his office in the back. “Just in time,” Hunt said.

“For what? Tell me we’ve got some work.”

“I’ll play your silly game. We’ve got some work.”

Mickey pumped a fist. “All right. You going out?”

“I am.”

“Where to?”

“Lunch at Le Central.”

Mickey whistled. Le Central was a white-tablecloth French restaurant down around the corner on Bush Street. This potentially meant that Wyatt had scored some deep-pockets client who would be footing the bill. “Who’s the client?” Mickey asked.

“Ah, the client. What client?”

“The one we’re talking about.”

“I’m afraid there is no client.”

“So where’s the work coming from?”

“What work?”

“The work you just said we had.”

Hunt leaned against Mickey’s desk and shrugged his shoulders. “Actually, truth be told, we don’t have any work.”

“But—”

“Hey. You told me to tell you we had some work, so I played along.

In fact, though, I’m afraid we don’t have any paying work.” He turned a palm up. “At this stage, we’d better be able to joke about it, don’t you think? And the good news is that I’m really going to have lunch at Le Central and was waiting for you. You eaten yet?”

“Not today. Other days, though, I have.”

Hunt broke a grin. “Good for you. So I won’t have to teach you how.” He looked around the small space with a wistful air, as though he might not see it again. “Let’s lock up and get ourselves on the outside of some grub.”

 

 

Le Central had a notice on its daily-updated blackboard informing its patrons that its famous and delicious cassoulet had been cooking now for 12,345 consecutive days. In spite of that, both Wyatt and Mickey agreed that it was too warm a day for the rib-sticking beans, duck, sausage, and lamb casserole, and instead both ordered the
poulet frites
—half a roasted chicken with fries. As an afterthought, Wyatt also ordered a bottle of white wine, by no means a common occurrence at lunchtime. When Mickey raised his eyebrows in surprise, he said, “Special occasion. You mind?”

“Not if you don’t mind me falling asleep at the desk this afternoon,” Mickey said. “But if you’re okay with that, I’ll force down a glass or two.”

“That’s the spirit.”

“What’s the special occasion?”

“Well, let’s wait for the wine. Meanwhile, tell me about this morning. You actually discovered the body?”

Mickey launched into a truncated version of the day’s events. The dead man, according to identification in his wallet, was Dominic Como, a prominent civic activist who’d gone missing about four days before. Even more startling, and depressing, from Mickey’s perspective, was the fact that his grandfather, Jim Parr, had worked for Como as his personal driver. The dead man had been one of Jim’s personal heroes. So now, if and when he went home tonight, Mickey would be sharing his one-bedroom, nine-hundred-square-foot walkup with a grieving grandfather and a train wreck of a sister.

The waiter appeared with their wine. Hunt tasted it, pronounced it fine, and then waited for their glasses to be filled before he lifted his. “Here’s to new beginnings.”

“New beginnings,” Mickey repeated. He hesitated, his glass poised in front of his mouth. “Why does that sound ominous?”

Hunt put down his untouched wine. “I’ve pretty much decided to close up the shop. Let you move on to your chef’s career.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll be all right. Probably just hook up with one of the other outfits in town. Either that, or get a real job someplace. All these computer and marketing skills I’ve gotten good at ought to be worth something to somebody, I figure. Maybe a start-up.”

“But you don’t want to do that.”

“Well, sometimes you don’t get to do what you want. You, for example, don’t really want to be a receptionist and gofer.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“Why not?”

“I’m a lot younger than you is one reason.”

Hunt almost chuckled. “Forty-five isn’t exactly one foot in the grave, Mick. People have been known to start over at that age. Goethe wrote
Faust
when he was eighty, so maybe there’s still some hope for me.”

“That’s not it. It’s not just the age. You love what you do.”

“I sure as hell don’t love sitting around the office waiting for the phone to ring.”