Tell No Lies Read online

  “But you don’t have any witnesses.”

  “We might.” Theresa drew out the pause, as if debating whether to share more. “One of the dishwashers at the restaurant is a convicted felon, a frequent flier in these hallowed halls, and an Aryan Nation piece of shit. When we questioned the kitchen staff, he was edgy as hell. He knows something or is lying about something.”

  “How can you tell?” Cris asked.

  “Despite my youthful looks, I been doing this a long-ass time.” Dooley stood and shot Cristina a pointed look. “I know when people are lying.”

  Cris’s expression changed to one of puzzlement.

  “So what’s your next move?” Daniel said.

  “I’m gonna question him,” Dooley said. “I want you to watch.”

  “Through a one-way mirror?”

  “You watch too much Law & Order.” She headed out, then paused in the doorway. “I want you in the room.”

  Daniel gave his wife’s hand a reassuring squeeze, let go, and stood.

  Theresa flashed Cris a flat smile. “Don’t worry. I’ll have him home by midnight.”

  Daniel followed the inspector down the hall. She secured her gun in a wall safe, then paused before a double-locked door. “It could get ugly in there, so I’m gonna warn you now,” she said. “This ain’t Metro South.”

  * * *

  Still dressed in a loose-fitting twill cotton dishwasher uniform, Brant Vogel slumped back in his chair, letting his long blond hair fall forward so his eyes peered through the screen of his bangs. One wisp pulled tight across his cheek to the corner of his mouth, his lips pursing as he sucked it. A wiry frame, all sinew and cords beneath his short-sleeved smock. A day’s stubble hid the pockmarks on his cheeks, but not well enough. Tattoos sheathed his left arm, the see-no, hear-no, speak-no-evil monkeys totem-poled down the forearm.

  Dooley kept her feet, setting her knuckles on the battle-scarred table across from Vogel, and Daniel moved to a corner, leaning against the wall.

  Vogel spit out his hair and flicked his chin at Daniel. “Why the fuck’s he in here?”

  “He’s a witness,” Dooley said. “You’re a witness. Why can’t we all just get along?”

  “I told you, Officer. I didn’t witness shit. Any high-order mammal knows that if I didn’t witness anything, then I ain’t a witness. See?”

  “High-order mammal. That’s clever.” She gestured at his right arm. “That’s a nice clean shave. Getting ready to do some fisting in the big house?”

  Daniel noticed that Vogel’s arm was in fact shaved smooth.

  Vogel lifted up his shirtsleeve, revealing a freshly scabbed tattoo capping the ball of his shoulder. “Had to get ready. I’m doing the rest of it tomorrow.”

  “Lemme guess,” Dooley said. “It’ll have skulls.”

  His lips tightened. Then he gave a little jerk of his head, his bangs parting just enough to provide a glimpse of the small prison tattoo at his hairline—a pinwheel swastika.

  Dooley smiled. “I like the new ink. Almost as much as I like your dishwasher getup. Getting paid by a Chinaman these days? That must make all that pure blood boil in your veins.”

  “We have to make do where we can. They run everything. The chinks and the kikes.”

  “How ’bout the blacks?”

  “Hell, I heard they’re letting them in the PD these days.”

  They enjoyed a laugh together. Then, keeping on with that friendly smile, Dooley reached across the table and gripped his right arm at the shirtsleeve. His lips went thin, but he didn’t flinch.

  “I know there’s something you’re not telling me.”

  He managed a smile, though it looked more like a grimace. “That kinky hair pickin’ up my brain-wave frequencies?”

  Dooley’s face stayed impassive. They stared across the table at each other. Spots of blood appeared through Vogel’s sleeve around Dooley’s clenched hand.

  “You know how many fools have sat in that chair before you?” she asked.

  Finally he pulled away, his pride scalded. He peeled back his sleeve, studied the cracked scabs, lowered it again. Then he glared at her through his bangs. “You know how many power-hungry niggers I’ve faced down?”

  She sat. Calmly. Smoothed her hands on the table’s surface. “Coon, sambo, darky, bluegum, jig, mosshead, porch monkey, spade. You wanna shock me? You can’t shock me. You know why? I live in San Francisco in the twenty-first century, and I’m an African-American female cop. I am one empowered fucking bitch. Now, look at me. Look deep into my chocolate brown eyes. Do I look rattled? No. But you, sweet thing…” She reached across the table, and he jerked away, but she merely laid two fingers over his pulse at his wrist. “Your heartbeat’s racing. Now, why is that? I’m not a gambling woman, but if I were, I would bet it’s because you’re interfering with a police investigation, whereas I have the force of the United States government behind me. Hard to believe, I know. World turned on its head. But that’s where we are. In this day and age. So. You want to get down to business?”

  “I don’t do business with your type.”

  “Okay.” She pushed back her chair and stood up. “Let’s get Inspector O’Malley. Nice white boy. Even has a red mustache. You’ll like him. O’Malley?”

  She barely raised her voice, but a moment later the door opened and O’Malley entered. “Yes, Inspector?”

  “Mr. Vogel here wants to be questioned by someone more to his liking.”

  “I’m on a case. He’ll have to wait in general pop.”

  “Who’s in there again?”

  “Just the usual Knock Out Posse members,” O’Malley said. “Dark-skinned fellahs, the lot of them.”

  “Cute,” Vogel said. “This is cute.”

  “Won’t be,” Dooley said. “In about ten minutes.”

  “And some Black Guerrilla Family, too, I think,” O’Malley added.

  Dooley made an oh-no face at Vogel. “That’s a lotta black folk.”

  “They won’t touch me,” Vogel said. “They don’t know who I am. Just another guy caught in the same system as them.”

  “Is that…?” Dooley circled the table, peered down at Vogel’s head. “Lice?”

  Vogel sagged back in his chair. “Oh, this is bullshit.”

  “It would be illegal to cohabitate Mr. Vogel with other prisoners if he has lice,” O’Malley said.

  “I don’t got no fuckin’ lice, man.”

  Dooley said, “Two negatives…”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. You don’t happen to have a razor, Inspector O’Malley?”

  “In fact I do. Right here.” O’Malley produced an electric razor from his pocket, slapped it into Dooley’s palm.

  Daniel watched the well-rehearsed act with discomfort. And a bit of admiration.

  “Okay,” Vogel said. “Hang on here.”

  He came out of his chair, but Dooley grabbed him and spun him hard, gripping his head from behind. “Missed your chance.” She pulled back his bangs to expose the pinwheel-swastika tattoo. “We’ll get you cleaned up before we put you in the cage with the lower-order mammals.” The vibrating blade hovered inches from his hair.

  “Wait! Fucking wait, okay? I’ll tell you.”

  Dooley turned off the razor, the sudden silence pronounced.

  “Sit,” she said.

  Vogel sat.

  “Talk,” she said.

  “I found something, okay,” Vogel said. “I don’t know anything about anything, but I found something the guy left behind.”

  “Left behind where?”

  “He used it. To pin that storage-room door open—the one that leads up to the street. Probably so he could sneak in or get out in a hurry. I found it after the fight down there, and I kept it.”

  “Why’d you keep it?”

  “’Cuz it was money.”

  “You found money propping the back door open?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where is it?”

  “You took it wh
en you processed me. You have all my shit.”

  Dooley gestured at Daniel, and he stayed on her heels out of the room, down a corridor, to a different wall of security glass. She knocked hard, and the desk cop spun around on a pivot chair. “Brant Vogel’s personals. I need his personals.”

  A moment later a plastic shoe box slid into the pass-through. Dooley grabbed it, looked down into it, and her face changed.

  She said through the speaker, “Get one of the lab rats down here. Now.”

  “What is it?” Daniel asked.

  She held the plastic shoe box out for him to see. Beside a set of keys and a duct-tape wallet was a roll of quarters. The paper sheath had split, most of the shiny coins spilling out into the box. Daniel leaned closer until several of the stamped dates on the metal came clear—1985, 1978, 2002.

  And yet every last quarter looked brand-new.

  Chapter 41

  At half past nine the next morning, James greeted Daniel at the door of Evelyn’s estate, wearing honest-to-God white gloves and a new pair of spectacles. James’s role had never been precisely defined. More than a chauffeur, less than a personal assistant or house manager, he’d simply been the person who took care of what Evelyn needed for as far back as Daniel’s memory stretched.

  “She’s making you wear butler gloves?” Daniel asked.

  “These?” James regarded his hands, and Daniel saw now that the gloves were in fact microfiber mitts. “No. I’m polishing the dashboards.”

  “Oh. I guess even she isn’t that pretentious.”

  James’s expression changed not at all yet somehow managed to convey irony. He gestured, and Daniel stepped into the lobbylike foyer, following him back. His shoulders ached from the fight on the concrete floor, his neck painfully stiff when he craned to take in the vaulted ceilings. But being here in the embrace of the house was a welcome distraction. An excuse to get his mind off the cellar brawl, the chase through Chinatown, and the roll of inexplicably shiny quarters that had baffled the entire Homicide Division last night.

  James removed his new eyeglasses, showing textured pouches beneath his eyes. For the first time, he looked older. He’d aged over the years certainly, but only in shades so gradual they went unnoticed, like afternoon fading into dusk. He’d always seemed fifty-five or thereabouts, frozen in time, a paragon of circumspection and mature restraint. But it struck Daniel now that any reasonable estimate had to put him close to seventy. Noting the slight stoop in James’s shoulders and the extra care he took stepping across a raised threshold gave Daniel a pang in the chest.

  They drifted through an elaborate set of French doors into the rear garden, where a half dozen rows in they found Evelyn kneeling on her flowered cushion, weeding with well-used hand tools. Each Sunday morning she toiled in her award-winning garden with meager enjoyment. A crew tended it the other six days of the week. She was never relaxed, least of all out here. Daniel often wondered what she got out of her few hours’ contribution. A contrived sense of accomplishment? Or was she simply duty-bound? This is what we do.

  Without lifting her head, she said, “I asked you to be here at eight.” Now she cast her gaze up, but only at James. “You want to get him to do something? Tell him to do the opposite.” She waved a muddy hand, dismissing whatever James didn’t say. “I know, I know.” She put on her version of his voice, English accent with a hint of swish, though in reality James displayed neither affect. “‘Wonder where he gets that?’”

  “May I finish with the cars, or are you going to improvise more of my dialogue?” James asked, with no hint of bitchiness.

  “The cars.”

  James withdrew. Evelyn went back to her weeds.

  Daniel rolled his neck, so stiff he could barely look at the sky. “I had a busy night,” he said. “And a busy morning.”

  “I heard.”

  “Of course you did.”

  “The story is working its way through the bullpen at the Chronicle,” Evelyn said. “Should be ready for the morning’s front page. They’re connecting the dots, putting the murders together, ascribing them to one killer. ‘The Tearmaker,’ they’re calling him. No ring if you ask me, but … you know, the business with the eyes. The president of the police commission said it’s gonna drop on this city like the Zodiac Killer but without all the cryptogram fun.”

  “He said that?”

  “No, but he would have were he pithier.” She plunged a trowel into the moist dirt. “I made a few calls. I’ve managed to prevent your name from leaking.”

  “Our name.”

  “No. Yours. I don’t recall scrambling around crime scenes playing Eliot Ness.”

  “Eliot Ness?”

  “I’m seventy-six. What do you want? Justin Bieber?”

  “There are some options between the two.”

  “Still. What are you doing? There are easier ways to get yourself killed. Xanax and scotch. Exhaust pipe and hose.” She threw down the trowel in disgust. “Meet every challenge head-on, is that it? Even other people’s?”

  He thought about trying to explain to her how impulse and obligation had wound him, pythonlike, into the case. How a sense of duty, however misguided, had dragged him into the thick of it, just as it dragged her out here every crisp Sunday morning to weed a garden that didn’t require her ministrations. He’d always hated standing by when others were at risk, but announcing so would sound cloying and self-serving, so he just breathed in the perfume of the prizewinning dwarf snapdragons, which had been pinched and pinched again to save their reblooming for these November weeks. Past the greenhouse and beyond the bluff, the Golden Gate Bridge added a few stalwart strokes to a dour gray sky.

  “It’s not safe,” Evelyn said. “What you’re getting into. And running out to dinner in Chinatown.” The last word given an extra dose of disdain. “I’d imagine Conchita is still going to the projects every day?”

  “Cristina. We’re being careful.”

  “You’re going to sit with that woman, are you? Molly Clarke? Tonight at midnight?”

  “Yes. With Inspector Dooley and a number of other—”

  “Can’t you just let the police handle it?”

  “The police have asked for my help.”

  “God forbid you say no to someone else besides me.” Her phone rang, and she wiped her hands on her bunched Polo sweatshirt, pulled it out, and glanced at caller ID. Her face soured.

  “Vimal?” Daniel asked.

  “I swear that man—and I use the noun liberally—needs a wet nurse.”

  “Why don’t you see about bringing someone else in, getting him some support?”

  “That’s none of your concern anymore, is it?” The phone slipped from her hand and thudded in the dirt. She tried to wipe it off, but the mud from her hands made marks on the casing. “You left. Just like your father did.” She seemed to be talking to herself more than to Daniel. She tossed the phone aside in frustration and glowered at the surrounding plants. “It’s a mess. Such a mess.”

  “What is?”

  “I made sure the angel’s trumpets were well established before winter. That the soil was drained.”

  An answer or a new topic?

  She rose and reached into the drooping white flowers, putting a yellow leaf on display. “And still the leaves are falling off.”

  “Spider mites?”

  “I pay a crew of gardeners—well, you don’t want to know what I pay them. They have one job in this world. One job. I have given them that luxury. And they can’t keep spider mites from my flowers?”

  “So fire them.”

  “I did. This is the third company.”

  “Mom, you can’t just sit up here on this hill and pick at people.”

  “What else do I have to do?” Her hand flew up as if to block the words, but they’d already escaped. She turned away, chagrinned, and began stripping dead leaves from the angel’s trumpets with fierce twists of her wrist. “I like being wealthy,” she said into the bush. “The summers in Costa Brava and my
brunches at the St. Francis. But I know there’s more to it. I know my money protects me. I know these servants would just as soon tear me to shreds as bring the tea service.” She laughed, a hollow noise. “But they don’t. There’s an order, and I like my place in it.”

  He watched her frail shoulders rise with an inhale.

  “One morning last year, I locked myself out of the house. I wasn’t done up, my face wasn’t on. Bathrobe. James had the day off. No staff here, nothing. Neighbors—not home. And I had to leave the community and go to the corner, that filthy liquor store, to call for a locksmith. And the guy behind the counter jerked his thumb at me and said, ‘Get in line.’ Just like that. He treated me like … like some old lady.”

  “Mom—”

  “I’m not special. I know that.” When she turned to face him, her eyes were steely as ever, though rimmed red with emotion. “But I don’t ever want to feel that way again.”

  His mouth had gone dry. With effort, he swallowed. “So you want to stay up here in your castle? Only interact with people you control?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And yes. I’m not like you, Daniel. You’re not like me. You never were. When you were in second grade, we brought you back a sterling letter opener from Paris. Very expensive. You took it to school for show-and-tell, and when we picked you up, we discovered that you’d given it away to one of your little friends. Were we angry! We said, ‘That was a very special present. Didn’t it mean anything to you?’ And you said, ‘Of course. That’s why I gave it to someone.’” She laughed. “Do you remember that?”

  He felt a grin touch his face. “I remember getting grounded.”

  “We tried to teach you the value of things.” She shook her head, set her dirty hands on her hips, her eyes everywhere but on him. “Looking back, I suppose … I suppose I’m proud of you.”

  “At one point,” he said, not unkindly, “that would have mattered a lot to me.”

  “Was I really that awful?” she asked.

  “You gave me a great gift, Mom.”

  “What’s that?”

  He said, “You taught me how to fight.”

  She took this not as an insult but as he’d intended. She regarded him a moment, then patted him affectionately on the chest and started back for the house.