Thieves Get Rich, Saints Get Shot Part 4

7.

Tess lived in Westwood, not far from UCLA, in a Tudor house set back from a quiet street. She led me to a guest room and left me alone to shower, but I couldn't wait to turn on CNN, to find out what the rest of the world thought it knew about me.

The police officer's name was Greg Stepakoff. His murder wasn't fresh news this Sat.u.r.day night; a line-of-duty death had first been reported in a San Francisco Police Department press release on Friday night, in time for the late news broadcasts. Stepakoff had been thirty-five, with a wife and daughter, and he hadn't shown up for his midwatch s.h.i.+ft as scheduled at four P.M. Friday. His colleagues had been concerned, as Stepakoff was responsible and punctual. Several hours later, responding to a citizen's phone tip, officers had gone to a St. Francis Wood address, where they'd found Stepakoff's car in the driveway and the officer dead in the house, shot twice in the chest. An ambulance had been called to transport a second person to the hospital. Pressed for details, the SFPD press liaison would say only that the second victim was a civilian, not an officer. This sparked early reports of a double shooting, which were erroneous.

By Sat.u.r.day morning the second victim had been identified, and in turn that identification made the story catch fire in the national media. The second victim, who had died late Friday night at UCSF Medical Center, was Violet Eastman, heiress to the Eastman distillery fortune and-under the pen name V. K. Eastman-a science-fiction writer of some note from the 1970s and '80s. She hadn't been shot but had died of dehydration, and her tox screen showed high levels of an unnamed sedative.

At a five P.M. news conference, the a.s.sembled reporters and the SFPD had different agendas. The SFPD press liaison mostly wanted to stress how much manpower was going into the investigation and to talk about plans for a Stepakoff memorial. The reporters' questions were much more pointed.

They wanted to know whether Eastman's death was being investigated as an illness or a poisoning. They also pointed out that the first sign that Stepakoff was missing had been when he'd failed to clock in and that it was apparently his personal car that was found in Eastman's driveway. In light of that, they asked, could he really be considered to have been killed in the line of duty? And if Eastman had lived alone and had been comatose, how had Stepakoff accessed the house? Had he gone in without a warrant?

And of course they wanted to know about the rumors of a young live-in caretaker at the Eastman house who now couldn't be located.

The press liaison said simply that the case would be treated as a line-of-duty death until further notice and that they didn't know how Stepakoff had accessed the house, but "we have no indication that he acted other than professionally." About the rumors of a young tenant/caregiver, she said again that "leads are being developed, and to comment further would be to jeopardize our investigation."

That didn't work as well as the department hoped. An hour later a radio station had reported the tenant/caretaker's name as Hailey Cain. Neighbors had seen her coming and going from the house, but only at a distance. A few had heard Eastman mention her by name. But no one had seen the young woman since all the official vehicles had convened in Eastman's driveway, the evening the cop was shot and Eastman was carried out on a stretcher.

The SFPD, apparently deciding that the door had been opened and that it was better to have the eyes and ears of the public working for them, had faxed another news release to the media confirming the tenant's name and adding a detailed description. That had been the source of the news report that Serena had seen. Now, at eleven, a reporter doing a stand-up outside the Eastman house was telling the world that I was to be considered armed and dangerous and that I was possibly driving a 1999 Mazda Miata.

I've never been in a G.o.dd.a.m.n Miata in my life.

More than anything it was the Miata-evidence of someone else's taste-that made this situation fully real. Since Serena had called me, I'd been thinking about this mess only as, Hey, it wasn't me. Now it was sinking in that a real, three-dimensional person had deliberately put on my ident.i.ty like an article of clothing and presented herself to the world as me.

Everything about it spoke of premeditation. People had seen the birthmark, which meant she'd re-created it with stage makeup. Maybe she'd bleached her hair, too, or gotten brown contact lenses. She'd moved in with Violet Eastman, lived with her. This was no short con. It was a long-term plan, working toward a big score.

And despite the fact that I'd lived in San Francisco last year, this woman didn't seem to have been afraid of our crossing paths. That was very interesting. Did she know I was in Los Angeles? She couldn't have found out through public records, since there was no paper trail of my life in Los Angeles. If she knew where I was, that suggested a personal connection. Someone had told her. Someone who knew me had helped her. Maybe not maliciously, but unwittingly.

The h.e.l.l of it was, I'd also unwittingly helped this unknown girl, the other "Hailey." Because while I hadn't died down in Mexico like I was supposed to, I'd gone home to Los Angeles and built a life so far underground it was suspect in itself. Who did I have to witness that I'd been in L.A. the past four months? g.a.n.g.b.a.n.gers and petty criminals, who could barely prove their own whereabouts on a regular basis. The hours just after Stepakoff and Eastman had been killed, I'd been in the desert, robbing a pair of trucks. What a great alibi that would make.

I'd thought I was so cool, dropping thoroughly off the grid, turning my back on the system with all its electronic trails and prying eyes. Now how screwed was I? Because just as I'd decided to shed my public self, someone else in San Francisco had been stepping into it.

From the doorway Tess cleared her throat, and I looked up. She'd changed into a fisherman's sweater and moleskin trousers, her feet bare. She was holding a bottle in one hand and two gla.s.ses in the other.

"I thought you could probably use a drink," she said.

"Yeah, I could," I said, muting the noise of the television.

She took a seat in a wing chair, setting the gla.s.ses on the nightstand and pouring us each about three fingers.

I took the square, heavy-based gla.s.s from her, tipped my nose down, and sniffed. "Gin?"

"Genever," she said. "A Dutch import."

"Wasted on me," I said. "I would have been happy with Coors Light."

I don't know what there was about her that made me want to play the working-cla.s.s rube. Maybe because I could never have matched her sophistication had I tried. Everything around us spoke of her good taste. The room we were in was mostly Victorian in its furnis.h.i.+ngs; in addition to the bed and the wing chair, there was a writing desk and a lamp of delicately scrolled bra.s.s with a frosted-gla.s.s shade. The room's colors were light as a watercolor painting, touches of mauve and gold and mossy green against the off-white walls and carpeting. On the floor the scuffed black boots I'd shed looked like the corpses of crows in an English garden.

She glanced at the silent TV screen and said, "You haven't told me yet what you think is going on. Do you have any theories?"

"Not yet."

"Well, this woman's motives, when they come out, will be financial," Tess said. It wasn't a question. Tess's businesses had always been legal, but she knew plenty of people who didn't operate aboveboard, starting with her biological father. "Within a day or two, the papers will be reporting financial irregularities in Eastman's accounts, check forgeries or large-amount withdrawals."

"That'd be my guess," I said.

"Hmmm." Tess tucked one leg up underneath her. "It isn't hard to see why she'd target Violet Eastman. She had money, lived alone, and was vulnerable. The question is, why you? How did she choose you to impersonate?"

"I don't know."

"Do you think this girl is somebody you know?"

Like an old high-school cla.s.smate? I considered that. "I doubt it," I said. "I haven't kept in touch with anybody from the old days. The connection might be looser than that. I was thinking earlier that this girl must know somebody I know."

"Why?"

"Because she seems to have inside information. She knows I wasn't living in or near San Francisco. It seems like she knew I was in L.A. or ..."

"Or what?"

"Wait." I held up a hand. An idea was tickling the edges of my mind. Slowly I began to put it into words: "Or she thought I was dead."

Tess grimaced. "Why would she think that?"

"Because there were several guys in particular who last year believed that I was dead. The tunnel rats."

"Who?"

"Your father's guys," I explained. "That's what I called the guys he sent to Mexico to get Nidia Hernandez. They shot me in the tunnel, a.s.sumed I was dead, dragged me off the road, and cleaned up the scene. One of them could easily have set aside my driver's license and pa.s.sport. Guys like that would know how valuable genuine ident.i.ty doc.u.ments are on the black market and how to find a buyer."

It was just a theory, but it was coming together fast, making a lot of sense. I'd thought of last year's ambush in the tunnel primarily as an attempted murder (mine) and a kidnapping (Nidia's), not a robbery. When I'd woken up in a Mexican hospital without any ID, I'd just a.s.sumed that my driver's license and pa.s.sport were rotting in a swamp, along with my duffel bag and clothing and everything else Nidia and I had carried with us.

"Plus," I added, "whoever sold this girl my ID, he could have a.s.sured her that the real Hailey Cain wouldn't raise an alarm about ident.i.ty theft, because she was a Jane Doe in the Third World morgue. At least that's what he thought at the time. It'd be a great selling point."

"Dead girls don't check their credit scores."

"Right. And that's only the half of it. In Mexico I was traveling with a gun. He had that to sell, too."

"Would she need to buy that from him? Guns are a lot easier to get a hold of than good ID doc.u.ments. The gun might have come from elsewhere."

"Might have but didn't," I said, giving her a humorless smile. "I loaded that gun myself. That's how my thumbprint got on one of the casings, which is now being interpreted as ironclad evidence that I was the shooter."

"G.o.d," Tess said. "It's almost perfect. I mean ... sorry."

I waved off her apology, thinking. I never learned the names of all seven guys from the tunnel. In fact, I just knew two: Joseph Laska, their leader, whom I'd thought of as "Babyface" for his soft, mastiff features, and a guy named Quentin, younger than Laska, with a live-wire energy and a foul mouth, and a s.e.xual appet.i.te that- There really wasn't any point in dwelling on last December and the events of the projection booth.

Speaking of which, there'd been a third guy in on that little interrogation session, a man named Will, but I'd never been sure he'd been one of the tunnel crew. That gave me seven to eight suspects, only one identified by first and last name. Not good odds.

Tess straightened out the leg she'd had tucked under her. She said, "You know, the woman who committed these crimes would have to look enough like you to pa.s.s for you."

"I know," I said. "But my looks aren't unusual. Except for the birthmark, which she probably did with some kind of makeup."

"But your general profile-white, female, early twenties-isn't one that I'd a.s.sociate with a well-planned financial crime. Or with murder, either." She drank again, then said, "This might not be funny to you, but if anyone asked me if I knew any woman in her early twenties with the nerve and initiative to carry out these crimes, I'd have said I know only one. You."

"You're right. Not funny."

"Sorry," Tess said. "But if there's a bright side to what I'm saying, it's that if this woman has arrests for similar crimes, she'll be in the system."

"That doesn't help unless someone looks for her, and the police won't. I'm their suspect. They don't need two."

Tess inhaled deeply and said, "They would look for her if you gave them reason to."

She seemed ill at ease. I said, "What kind of a reason?"

Her gla.s.s empty, Tess rolled it in her hand. She wasn't looking at me when she said, "I think you should get ahead of this and turn yourself in." She looked up and added, quickly, "I'll go with you. You'd be safe with a respectable businesswoman at your side."

"For a minute or two," I said. "But once they arrest me and take me behind closed doors, what happens, happens."

"Hailey-"

I raised a hand, stopping her. "The real problem is that I can't prove my innocence yet. And if no one else does, I could get tried, convicted, put to death."

"You've been living in Los Angeles for these last four months, haven't you?" Tess said. "Surely there are plenty of witnesses to that. I could mention seeing you socially, twice, since you've moved back here."

"That's two days out of more than a hundred and twenty."

Tess raised an eyebrow, but she said, "Hailey, they can't possibly find your fingerprints or DNA in that house. That's got to count for something."

"Maybe," I said.

She went on, "In the morning maybe I can make some phone calls for you. I still have contacts up in San Francisco, people who might have known Eastman socially. I'll just ask what they've heard, for things that haven't been released on the news. I won't say, 'Hailey Cain's right here sitting next to me.' "

"I know you wouldn't," I said. "But be careful, anyway. The last thing you need is police in Kevlar kicking down your door because someone tipped them that you might be harboring a fugitive cop killer."

8.

I woke up the next morning at ten, to find a note taped to the bathroom mirror.

Hailey-Have whatever you like from the refrigerator, etc., for breakfast. Also, you should check out the profile of Violet Eastman in today's LA Times, it's quite good.

Whatever you do, please don't leave before I get back and go out on the streets by yourself.

-Tess She didn't say where she'd gone, and it wasn't until I saw the cheerful colored egg and the words Happy Easter by the date on the Times that I remembered it was Easter. Church? Tess had never seemed religious to me, but you never could tell.

The kitchen was so perfectly clean that I didn't feel comfortable cooking. I poured myself a large bowl of cereal instead, and sliced up a banana on top. The kitchen had a generous island with two stools, and it was there that I ate breakfast and read the profile of Violet Eastman.

Eastman's grandfather had been Johnny MacClain Eastman, the tenth-grade-educated Tennesseean who'd formulated Eastern Gentleman whiskey. By his death Eastman Distilleries had bought up several rivals and produced not only Eastern Gentleman but a costly premium blend called MacClain's Extra Rare and a line of ciders and hard lemonades favored by college students. After Johnny MacClain Eastman's death, his son, John Eastman Jr., took over the business for two decades before selling to a big umbrella corporation.

Eastman Jr. had had a single child, Violet. Her father's acquaintances remembered an always-tall-for-her-age girl who seemed perpetually to have a book in her hand or to be rambling the estate with her dogs, who'd shunned girlish pursuits like sleepover parties and shopping expeditions. But where conventional wisdom would call for a bookish heiress to be unprepossessing and awkward, Violet Eastman was remembered as confident and dryly funny when she did appear at parties. Photos from her youth showed good cheekbones and long-lashed eyes, and adolescence took her tall frame from the pejorative "skinny" to the approving "slender."

Though something of a tomboy, Eastman had a traditional coming-out and then went away to school at Oberlin. After college she'd seemed to be living the idle life of an heiress, settling down in New York City, working only part-time as a drama critic, traveling when she pleased. Only much later did friends learn her secret: She'd been steadily gaining a readers.h.i.+p in science-fiction magazines, writing under the androgynous name V. K. Eastman.

A few paragraphs followed about her writing career, some of which was lost on me; I wasn't familiar with the names in science fiction to whom she was compared, nor the magazines in which she'd published. But her work was lauded as technically accomplished and more subtle and literate than could usually be expected of the pulp magazines of the time. Her stories were regularly chosen for year's-best anthologies. In the late eighties, she'd co-written the screenplay for a very successful film, one whose clever dialogue and subtle antiracism themes elevated it beyond the label of "s.p.a.ce opera."

At age thirty-six, after seeming to commit to a life of single blessedness, Eastman surprised everyone by marrying a man twenty years her senior, a CDC epidemiologist for whom she moved from New York to Atlanta. The popular guess was that the marriage was one of convenience, between a man facing the discomforts of old age and a middle-aged single woman who feared a life of loneliness.

Again the easy supposition was wrong. They bought a house on the river and entertained there. They kept dogs. They traveled, often to exotic Third World locations instead of comfortable resorts. They moved together to San Francisco when he traded his CDC position for a department chair at UCSF Medical Center. In all, Eastman and her husband stayed together for twenty-two years, and she nursed him through more than a year of cancer treatments before he died.

Afterward Eastman stayed in the home they'd shared in the quiet, wealthy enclave of St. Francis Wood. She continued writing, though she published less frequently. Health problems were cited: a bad hip, vision problems that caused her to surrender her driver's license.

So last winter she'd advertised for a tenant to live in a semidetached private apartment in her home, offering free rent in exchange for light household help, errand running, and care of Eastman's elderly borzoi, the last of the four dogs she'd adopted with her husband. The horrible outcome of that venture was now well known. Readers were referred to a sidebar on the newest developments in the murder investigation.

The sidebar didn't have much to say. LONGTIME FRIEND RAISED THE ALARM, the headline read. The story explained that a Crescent City woman, Karen Adkins, had become concerned after Eastman failed to call Adkins on Adkins's birthday. It had been a longtime, never-fail tradition between the two friends, once cla.s.smates at Oberlin, that they exchanged birthday greetings by phone. Phoning the house, Adkins had spoken to a young woman calling herself Hailey, who'd said that she was Eastman's live-in personal a.s.sistant and that Eastman was too ill to come to the phone. Questioned about the exact nature of Eastman's illness and why she wasn't in the hospital if she was too sick even to take a phone call, Hailey had become vague and evasive. Adkins became suspicious. Something, she told the Chronicle reporter, was just "off" about the young woman she'd spoken to.

Adkins had tried to call Eastman again the next day and this time had gotten no answer at all. She was torn-worried about her friend yet feeling unable to justify calling the police. She'd compromised by calling Greg Stepakoff, a police officer and the son of another old friend, asking him to go by Eastman's house, unofficially, and check out the situation. Stepakoff had said this was no problem. It was when hours pa.s.sed with no return call from him, and when he'd proved equally unreachable on his cell, that Adkins had been worried enough to call the SFPD main line and make things official.

This had cleared up the issue of whether Stepakoff's death had been a line-of-duty killing-it wasn't-but the SFPD saw the difference as merely semantic. Stepakoff's actions had been "clearly consistent with his sworn goal to protect and serve the public," the press liaison said. "We feel this investigation deserves the respect that a line-of-duty death would receive, and we're sure the public is in agreement with us on that."

I'd rinsed my cereal bowl and started a pot of coffee brewing when I heard a key in the lock of the front door, and Tess came in.

"Is that coffee? Perfect," she said. She set a box down on the counter, with a woman in a glamorous, hair-swinging pose on the front. It was hair color. "I thought we'd change your hair a bit," she said.

I looked more closely at the box and the shade, a medium brown, about the color of a portobello mushroom. I said, "I'm a little disturbed by how quickly you've gotten with the fugitive program."

She was checking the progress of the drip coffeemaker. "Turning yourself in still gets my vote, but last night you closed the door on that, and next you're going to tell me that you can't stay in my house indefinitely. Right?"

"Probably."

"Then you need to be less recognizable." Tess took an oversize mug covered in bright polka dots down from a wall rack and poured herself a generous amount of coffee.

"You know," I said, "this'll help some, but my birthmark is the real problem. It's worse than having a name tag on my face."

"There's makeup for that," she said.

"Won't work," I said. "When I was younger, I'd get into my mother's cosmetic kit and try to cover it up with liquid foundation and powder. Then more liquid, then more powder. Makeup never quite covers it. All it does is draw attention to the fact that I've tried to cover it up."

Tess gave me an obliquely amused look. "That's not exactly what I had in mind. You need to start thinking like a movie person."

About ninety minutes later, I couldn't stop looking in the mirror with fascination. My hair was newly brown, and high on my cheekbone, covering the birthmark, was a deep bruise. Tess had created it from a mixture of mascara, eye shadow, a little mineral oil to blend, and then face powder to counteract the s.h.i.+niness of the oil.