Thieves Get Rich, Saints Get Shot Part 7

"You get the car and come around. The less they see of me again, or us together, the better."

She nodded, put the napkins and straws into the bag, and left.

I stood inside the door, not too close, watching her retreating form. I couldn't see Pratt and the other guy, but their car was still visible. A group of high-school-age kids came in, laughing together and briefly blocking my view. Then, when they were past, I saw a second police car crawling slowly up the far aisle of the parking lot, in the direction of the first.

This was probably a popular shopping center for coffee and lunch breaks. That was probably all there was to it.

Or Pratt could have called them.

Had he recognized me and just been playing me with the wallet card of abuse hotlines? Was he engaging me in conversation to get a further look at my face? It didn't make sense, unless he was a careful guy, too careful to confront a known cop killer in a public place, with an inexperienced young partner.

But I'd been looking at his face the whole time he'd been seeing mine, since I dropped the phone book. I hadn't seen anything change in his expression. Either he had the best poker face in the world or he'd been ignorant of who I was.

The Caprice reached the curb outside the deli at about the same time that the second squad car pulled in next to the first. Lifting my chin, I pushed the door open and ambled quickly but casually to Serena's car. Then I pulled the pa.s.senger-door handle, which snapped back against the door. It was locked.

"Serena!" I b.u.mped the gla.s.s hard with the side of my fist, then lowered my head against the edge of the roof, face tipped down, out of view. Serena reached over and opened the door, the latch clicking free as she did so. I slid hastily inside.

"Sorry," Serena said. "That other five-oh car distracted me."

I slid down, out of view again. "It might be nothing. Don't panic."

It took a good fifteen minutes on the freeway before we were both satisfied it had been nothing. Serena had glided out into the center lane of 101 North and kept the speedometer needle at the posted sixty-five miles per hour, while I stayed in my uncomfortable position below the dashboard. Meanwhile she grilled me on my encounter with the police.

"How close did they see you?"

"Close. Like, normal range for conversation."

"You talked to them? Are you crazy?"

"I didn't have a choice," I said, and explained about Pratt seeing my bruise and his suspicions of abuse.

"Okay, so he didn't suspect anything."

"Probably not."

I straightened up, then reached down between my feet, to where I'd left the deli bags on the floorboard. I got busy unwrapping sandwiches and handed Serena's to her.

"Listen," I said, poking a straw through the lid of my c.o.ke, "while we're on the subject of the five-oh, there's something I should tell you. I don't want you to find out by accident and think I was hiding it from you."

"That sounds heavy," she said. "What is it?"

"I've been talking over the phone to a cop about the Eastman case, a cop that thinks I didn't do the murders." I sipped from my c.o.ke. "It's Magnus Ford."

Serena's eyebrows jumped sharply, though she didn't take her eyes off the road. "Ford, the freaking Shadow Man himself? You just called up and got through to him?" Then alarm broke through her surprise. "Hailey, you're not gonna roll over on me, are you?"

"Of course not, you G.o.dd.a.m.n know better," I said.

"I did, prima, but you've never been wanted for two murders before. You've got a lot to gain by trading."

"First, Ford doesn't know I'm Insula," I said, my tone matter-of-fact. "Second, even if he did, no one would go light on a cop killer just to get at a g.a.n.g.b.a.n.ger, even a shot caller like you. Third, if I was going to cut a deal like that, I wouldn't be sitting here telling you I'm talking to the guy. How smart would that be?"

Serena nodded slowly. "I guess so," she said. Then, curiously, "So what's he like?"

As if I'd met a celebrity. After a second the absurdity struck both of us, and we started laughing.

12.

Four hours later I was lying on a hotel bed, about five floors above Powell Street. Serena had registered for us; I'd waited in the car for her to come back with the keys before we'd gone up in the elevator.

She was in the bathroom now, and I was watching TV, though the Eastman case wasn't dominating the news anymore; it was relegated to the crawl on CNN. Lack of new information, I supposed, and a lack of reporters to cover what there was.

Until I'd met Jack Foreman, I hadn't realized that newspapers and TV stations, like most businesses, were short-staffed on weekends. In theory, Jack had explained, everyone acknowledged that news didn't differentiate between weekday and weekend. In practice, he'd said, any reporter with any amount of seniority had an "enterprise" piece in the can by Friday night and spent Sat.u.r.day and Sunday at home with the kids.

I'd been surprised, told him that I'd thought reporters lived to rush out the door at any hour in pursuit of a good story. Jack had shaken his head. "A rare few," he'd said, "but you'd be surprised how many are willing to let a story jell for a day. That's what my old editor in New Jersey used to call it. Or editors say, 'We'll run a follow tomorrow.' " He'd laughed at my look of disbelief.

Tomorrow, Monday, the gears would begin to mesh in earnest. Whether that would be good for me or bad, I didn't know. I had to believe that eventually, under enough scrutiny, this case would render up a detail that would tell investigators I hadn't committed these crimes, despite the fingerprint on the casing, despite everything.

If that didn't happen, if things really went sour here, maybe I could join Jack Foreman in Kiev. Maybe he could use a bodyguard. Journalists got killed sometimes in the developing former-Soviet nations. Besides, we'd always gotten along fine together in bed.

Restless, I flipped away from CNN, around the other cable news channels until I recognized the exterior of the Eastman home, no longer under police barricades and crime-scene tape, closed up and empty. I turned up the sound, but not fast enough to catch the thrust of that report before the story changed to international news.

Serena came out of the bathroom, glanced at the TV and saw a commercial playing, and sat down on the corner of her bed. "Okay," she said. "What's the plan?"

I rolled over to lie with my chin in my hand. "Can you make a run to a drugstore?" I asked.

"What do you need?"

"Safety pins, in a couple of different sizes, and a little screwdriver."

"Lock-picking stuff," she said, understanding immediately. "You're going to the dead woman's house. Are you sure that's safe?"

"Reasonably," I said. "It's been two days. The technicians and detectives shouldn't need a round-the-clock presence anymore. I'll go late tonight and park a little ways off and walk to the house under cover of darkness. It's about the quietest residential area in the whole city. The neighbors will be sleeping, and even the most ambitious detective isn't going to be there after midnight."

"There are graveyard-s.h.i.+ft cops," Serena said.

I shook my head. "Those are the kind of cops that mop up bar fights. Major-crimes detectives and forensics people might get called out to a fresh murder scene after midnight, but no one's going to be doing routine follow-up work at that hour."

"Okay, but what are you looking for?"

"Anything," I said. "Anything that'll tell me who this 'Hailey' chick was. If she left any clothes or shoes behind, I'll know something about her height and build. If there's red or pink swipes on the bedspread, I'll know what color she paints her toenails."

"Then we can stake out shoe stores and look at women's bare feet until we catch her."

"I'm just saying, she's a woman, I'm a woman. You think most cops know how often you paint your toenails sitting on the bed, and how you accidentally smear a little on the spread because you're moving around again before they're dry?"

She didn't look convinced, but said, "Give me some money, then. For the drugstore."

13.

By twelve-thirty A.M. I was in the Caprice, driving the speed limit and obeying all traffic laws, heading south on surface roads toward the St. Francis Wood neighborhood.

Serena wasn't with me. It wasn't at all like her to fall asleep before midnight, much less without the use of Ambien or marijuana, but tonight she'd done both, dropping off peacefully in front of the quietly murmuring TV set we were both watching. I'd wanted her as a lookout, but couldn't bring myself to rob her of natural sleep. So I'd done a touch-up on my makeup bruise, gathered the tools I'd need and the car keys, and slipped out, leaving the TV on, lest the unexpected absence of its noise wake her.

Now, driving alone and cautiously, I flicked the turn signal and exited off Route 1 toward Mount Davidson.

Ask most people where the rich live in San Francisco and many of them will mention Pacific Heights or the Marina District. Outside the Bay Area, mention of St. Francis Wood gets you a lot of puzzled glances. It's a secret garden, guarded at its foot by a graceful white fountain and from above by the stark white cross on Mount Davidson, hilly and hidden and very rich, but rarely ostentatious. It was my bad luck-well, worse luck on top of bad-that the girl who chose to steal my face and name had ended up here, of all places in San Francisco. In a city that wedged even its millionaires in with a shoehorn, St. Francis Wood offered that rarest of luxuries-a little s.p.a.ce and privacy. The other Hailey had never had to ride in an elevator with her neighbors. If she'd been careful to come and go from Eastman's home in her car, mostly after dusk, she would never have to be up close with her neighbors at all.

I didn't have Eastman's address, but the news reports had shown the house on camera, a narrow two-story of wood and brick, the wood painted a pale, creamy yellow and the brick aged and mottled with white, not the stark all-red kind of barracks and dormitories. English ivy climbed its edges, and April tulips bordered the slender strip of lawn.

When I spotted it, there was no sign of an ongoing police presence. I eased past at about fifteen miles an hour, then doubled back to park far enough away that the car wouldn't point to my location. Bad enough I had to park a car like Serena's in this neighborhood at all. It was, in 911 lingo, a suspicious vehicle: a cheap sedan in a district of late-model imports and luxury SUVs. It stood out, but there was nothing I could do about that, except park it courteously flush with the curb and not leave it there any longer than I needed to.

The nearly full moon illuminated my surroundings to an almost uncomfortable degree as I walked back toward the house. I stayed in shadows until I could cross Eastman's dew-wet lawn, then unlatched a gate and went into the backyard. It was narrow, with several shade trees at the edges. Brambles that would produce blackberries in the summer overran the back fence, and the gra.s.s was native gra.s.s brought up by winter rains, not deliberate green turf. Protected from view by both the trees and the predawn dimness, I paused to consider my options. A pair of French doors opened onto a small porch, but of more interest to me were two steps that led up to a door on the east side of the house. The door and the way the roof angled downward there suggested to me a room with its own entry. Was this where she'd lived, the girl who'd posed as me?

The blinds were down on the window, so I couldn't peek in. But this made as good a place as any for my covert entry. I reached into the pack for my tools.

Serena had taught me lock picking earlier this year, after I'd had to do an artless pry job on a door as part of a break-in I'd considered merited, if not legal.

Last year a man I'd trusted, if not considered a friend, had sold me to Skouras for fifteen thousand dollars. I'd nearly died as a result of his betrayal. For that reason, I'd had no remorse about the mess I'd made of his back door, nor about taking the remainder of the fifteen grand that he'd hidden in his kitchen.

This time I didn't want to draw attention to the fact that someone had broken in, and thanks to Serena's teaching, I now had the skills to finesse the lock. It was mostly a matter of dexterity, one hand putting torque on the cylinder with a screwdriver while the other hand, wielding the safety pin, found and teased up the pins. Steady hands helped. Many people, in this situation, would be nervous. I wasn't.

The lock gave way, the cylinder rolling obediently under the pressure of my left hand. I straightened up and went in, closed the door quietly behind me, took out my flashlight, and looked around.

I was in a generously sized, clean bedroom with a standard setup: double bed in the center of the room, head against the wall, two night tables, a bureau with a large mirror perched on it and one framed photo, bookshelves, and a dog bed on the floor.

This wasn't where the renter had lived; this was Violet's bedroom. Two things told me that. First was the dog bed. An aged dog would want to sleep with its mistress, and vice versa. Second, the photo on the dresser was of Eastman and her husband. They were clearly traveling somewhere, standing in front of an open-air fruit market. She was maybe in her late forties or around fifty, hair pulled back under a straw sun hat. He was hatless, white-haired and lean-faced, and they were linking arms. They were, if not young, at least not yet touched by the depredations of old age. They looked good, straight-backed and serene, and I knew that the young grifter, no matter how stunted her conscience, wouldn't have wanted to look at that photo on the dresser. It would have indicted her every day.

There was a faint chemical scent in the air: The forensics guys had been here, dusting for fingerprints, though I couldn't see obvious signs that anything had been removed or rearranged.

Further inspection of the room bore out that it was Violet's: There was a pair of reading gla.s.ses on one night table, some large-print books on the bookshelf, and a faded yellow robe hanging on a hook on the back of the door. But beyond that I was surprised at how few markers of age there were in this room. There were no prescription bottles by the bed, nor over-the-counter meds. Other than the one photo, there was no clutter of memorabilia in the room, no framed pulp-magazine covers to attest to Eastman's writing career, no old photographs to remind her of her youth and onetime beauty. A vase held several wilting stalks that had once been bright sunflowers. The books on the shelf were a mix of nonfiction and fiction, but all of quality: no diet books written by celebrities.

Seen in daylight, without the scent of fingerprint dust and with the sunflowers in bright bloom, this would have been a pleasant place, entirely plausible as the room of a much younger woman. There was an ageless quality about it, or at least a sense of old age faced unsentimentally.

I went into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. There were no prescription bottles inside. That made sense. Eastman had been fatally sedated. Probably the police had taken all her medications into evidence, in case one of them was the drug that had put her into a coma.

I walked out into the living room, where it became clear that the forensics people had been through. Here the chemical scent was stronger, and there were patches cut out of the light brown carpeting in the center of the room.

This was where it had happened. There were patches of carpet taken up because Stepakoff had bled and died here. This was where the grifter had found him, or he'd found her.

At least that was my a.s.sumption, that she'd been surprised by the young cop. I'd always heard that con artists tried to avoid violence, as did female criminals, and this woman was both. If she'd fired on Stepakoff, she'd felt she had no other choice.

That was interesting. If V. K. Eastman hadn't been able to open the door, and "Hailey" wouldn't have, had Stepakoff entered the house illegally, as the press had suggested? Maybe Stepakoff had been a bit of a hot dog, and he'd gone in through a window after seeing Eastman nonresponsive on the couch. San Francisco, like Los Angeles, had been in the throes of an early-spring heat wave the past week, so it was very plausible that a window had been open; many San Francisco homes, even expensive ones, didn't have air-conditioning, because intolerable heat was so rare.

I went around raising the blinds on all the windows, and when I had, the bright moonlight that had made me a little wary on the street now flowed through the windows and made my flashlight unnecessary; I switched it off.

Stepakoff going through a window was the answer that allowed for the renter taking him by surprise, which seemed certain. He'd made no call for backup, and his gun had been in its holster. He'd been shot without warning. And he'd died right here.

The living room was also where Eastman had spent her final hours, lying on this velvety, dun-colored couch. I saw a freestanding metal object by the sofa. Under closer inspection it turned out to be a quad cane, a cane with a more stable four-toed foot. So Eastman hadn't been very mobile. That was probably why she'd taken the downstairs apartment as her bedroom: no stairs to climb.

This all made sense. I could see how Eastman had ended up dying on the couch, not on her bed. She'd had some health problems, but she wasn't bedridden, and "Hailey" had been a personal a.s.sistant but not a nursemaid who brought meals to her bedroom. At least that was how the media reports had made it seem. So it was likely the first dose of sedatives had probably been administered in the living room, under the guise of a friendly drink together: Why don't I make us some tea? Then, after Eastman had succ.u.mbed to the first drugging, "Hailey" probably hadn't had the strength to carry her from the couch to her bedroom. Follow-up dosing had been done here.

I went into the kitchen and, still touching everything obliquely and never directly by the handle, found what you'd expect: plates and gla.s.ses and silverware, food in the cupboards. For a moment it seemed odd to me that so many everyday things remained here, but then the forensics techs who had gone through the place weren't a cleanup crew. Taking away the clothing and the canned foods and the books, that would fall to Eastman's heirs or friends.

There was no second bedroom downstairs, meaning the grifter had lived on the second floor.

The first room upstairs was a home office: a heavy, old-fas.h.i.+oned banker's desk and a metal filing cabinet. The cover to the rolltop desk was up, but little remained on it: pens and pencils, a notebook, a dictionary. I picked up the notebook and opened it, but it was blank. That didn't surprise me. Likewise, if there were manila folders left in the filing cabinet, they'd be empty, unused spares. Whatever the young grifter hadn't taken in her predatory searches of Eastman's office, the police would have taken as evidence. It would do me little good to poke around in here.

Yet I couldn't help but think, before I left, Why did Eastman trust her so much? It seemed that Violet's tenant had had easy access to this office, and thus to everything-applications for savings and brokerage accounts, with Eastman's Social Security number on them, bank statements with balances, stock certificates, the t.i.tle to the car.... If Eastman couldn't climb the stairs, the grifter wouldn't even have had to worry about getting caught looking for these things. She could have done it at her leisure.

Maybe Violet had trusted the young woman simply because she'd had to, because she was ill and too low on energy to do a thorough background check. Old age was frightening, the vulnerabilities it brought.

I crossed the hall to the other bedroom. It was on the backyard side of the house and didn't get the same generous moonlight as the front, so I switched on the flashlight once again.

The room was big, obviously once the master bedroom. What caught my eye was not the bed but the piano. That took me by surprise. I hadn't even known that Eastman could play. She must have been good. n.o.body pays movers to bring a piano up to the second floor without a serious commitment to the instrument.

Beyond that, the room was furnished in Twenty-first Century Girl: cream and pale blue, with several fat scented candles on the dresser, as well as a wicker basket full of small seash.e.l.ls. This was where she'd lived, the other "Hailey."

Please let there be something personal. Clothes, shoes, anything.

The ceiling was high in here, as in the rest of the house, and a shelf ran over the door, but its individual cubbies had been cleaned out. The closet was a walk-in with no door on it, and it took me only a glance in that direction to realize there was nothing in it but hangers and an ironing board leaning against the back wall. The drawers of the bureau were empty.

Either she'd taken her things with her-the likeliest scenario-or the police had taken what she'd left as evidence. I felt deflated. If nothing else, I'd hoped to get a sense of her height and weight compared to mine. I already knew she was Caucasian and close enough in age to me to pa.s.s as me. I sat down on the bed, thinking. Surely there had to be something else here I could learn from.

That was when somebody shut the front door downstairs. Not covertly, like I'd pulled the door to V.K.'s bedroom softly closed behind me after breaking in. This was a declarative, I-belong-here sound. That meant a cop.

I clicked off the flashlight immediately, then got silently to my feet and stood in the bedroom doorway, listening. The downstairs footsteps were as confident-sounding as the door's closing-unhurried but not tiptoeing. Then I heard him climbing the stairs. Dammit, this was happening too fast. Why couldn't he have needed something from Violet's bedroom or the living room, where most of the forensic work had been done?

The bedroom window was a single pane of gla.s.s; it didn't open. The closet offered no refuge. It didn't have a door, and there was nothing inside it to hide behind or under.

The footsteps were still coming.

I studied the st.u.r.dy-looking shelf that ran over the door. It was wide enough for me to crouch on, if I put my hands against the ceiling for balance.

I took my gun from my runner's pack, checked the safety, and tucked it into my jeans at the small of my back. Then I carefully got up on the dresser, braced one foot on the doorway's edge, and pulled myself up. Easy, easy, okay, good. I got my legs under me properly, crouching, both hands braced against the ceiling, because there wasn't any place in front of me to put them for balance. It wasn't a comfortable position, but I wouldn't be here long.

I had one thing on my side: I could hear only one set of footsteps, and no voices. That meant a lone policeman, not a pair.