Bones of the Barbary Coast (Cree Black Thrillers) Page 3

  A minute later, Cree pulled behind him into a driveway on the uphill side of the house. They both got out and she followed him to the front sidewalk, where he lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and turned to look up at the tall facade.

  "It's good we're coming in now," he said, "the contractors have gone home. Otherwise we'd never park within a couple blocks. Nice digs, huh?"

  It was a big, mostly Italianate Victorian just a block down from the crest of the hill, with bay windows, bracketed cornices, elaborate pillars and ornamentation on the porches. The dusty, curtainless windows, one framing a stepladder, showed it was unoccupied and under repair. It was separated from its uphill neighbor by only a thin screen of green stuff that ran along the gangway where they'd parked, but the downhill side faced a garden terrace that took up a full additional lot and exposed the north wall of the house to the big vista. Given the slant, the far end of the terrace was a good sixteen feet above the street.

  Cree made an appreciative murmur.

  "Yeah, the new owners, they got to be millionaires," Bert said. "They'll have a real showpiece when they're done fixing it up."

  "How do they like finding a skeleton in their basement?"

  Bert flicked his ash with a tossing gesture. "Not too happy. They're moving from Boston, need the place ready by their move date, and it set the work back while we exhumed the bones. I still got the basement room closed off in case we want a second look, kind of a hassle for them. Plus they have a couple of kids, they don't want to put the kids off the new place, make it seem scary. I haven't told them about the unusual characteristics of the remains, why saddle them with that."

  He looked up at the house, drawing deeply on his cigarette, apparently in no hurry to go inside. Cree shifted gears to match his tempo. If he was working himself up to confiding in her, she'd give him the time. Anyway, it was pleasant, here on the steep slope, with the long views, the late-afternoon sunshine. She tipped her face toward the sky and soaked it in.

  "My social skills are a little rusty, Cree," Bert admitted. His pouched eyes slid over, reconnoitered her response. "I was in such a hurry to get to Skobold's shop I didn't even ask about the family."

  She gave him a quick rundown. Mom was pretty happy; she had a nice little apartment and loved her work at the neighborhood rec center. The angioplasty had relieved the heart congestion they'd been worrying about, and her blood pressure was much better with the new medication. Cree saw a lot of Deirdre; Dee's two kids were fabulous nieces, twins but with completely different personalities, and Dee and her husband had a terrific marriage. Between Don's carpentering and Dee's teaching, they were doing all right.

  Uncle Bert nodded noncommitally. "How about Cree?"

  I’m great, she almost started to say. Then it occurred to her that candor might elicit the same from Bert. "Frankly? The last few months have been a little funky for me. It's coming together, though."

  Another noncommital nod. "Your husband—" Bert's hand groped for the name.

  "Mike."

  "Mike. It's been like ten, twelve years, now. You got a boyfriend now or—"

  "That issue is under review at this time." Cree tipped her hand side to side, yes and no. She tried to keep it light, gave him a wry grin.

  Bert sucked on his cigarette. "Yeah, relationships, they can bend you out of shape, huh?"

  "This is pretty well my regular shape."

  If Bert noticed the tightening of her tone, he didn't acknowledge it. "So this outfit of yours, Psi Research Associates, the whole parapsychology thing . . . how'd that happen?"

  "How'd a nice girl like me end up in a profession like this?"

  "If that's how you see it."

  "I had a very disturbing experience some years ago. At the time, I was skeptical about anything paranormal, didn't believe in ghosts. But then I got a very convincing demonstration that we don't know anything about how the mind really works, how the world works. The experience turned all my beliefs upside down. Afterward, I was . . . drawn to doing research in the field."

  "That would do it," he agreed expressionlessly.

  Cree would have gone on, but this was sounding too confessional, and Bert wasn't buying any of it anyway. She went on crisply, "Along the way I discovered I have certain cognitive attributes that sensitize me and make me unusually accessible to experiences like that one. I have a business partner, Edgar Mayfield, who approaches our research as a physicist and engineer, and an assistant, Joyce Wu, who covers most of the historical and forensic investigation side of it. I'm sorry she couldn't come help with this, but she had a family emergency. Our little firm is keeping surprisingly busy."

  Uncle Bert said nothing, but there was something apologetic about the way he nodded, as if he regretted probing difficult territory.

  "What's your opinion, Uncle Bert? You sure you don't believe in ghosts?" She was trying to make it easier for him. She couldn't shake the conviction that something must have happened during the exhumation of the bones, something that prompted him to call her.

  Bert threw down his cigarette and ground it out with his toe. "My opinion is, we should get inside, look the place over while we still got some daylight. About ghosts, all I know is, I've been around one hell of a lot of dead people, and I've never seen one. At this point, I don't expect to, either."

  3

  THE RENOVATION CHAOS couldn't hide the fact that this was a lovely place. The front door opened to a hallway that ran back into the house, a fine staircase rising on the left side. Along the right were doorways to what in Victorian days would have been the parlor and sitting room, spacious, high-ceilinged rooms now full of table saws, tarps, stepladders, coils of electrical cord, toolboxes, all filmed with dust. The elegant proportions and woodwork were charming, Cree thought, but in the end it was the light that made the space so agreeable. The windows of all the rooms on the downhill side framed views of the bay, the hills of Sausalito, the Golden Gate Bridge, and a huge expanse of sky that would no doubt bring light inside even through San Francisco's infamous fog. Just below, the garden terrace was a rectangle of cut flagstone, with benches and raised plantings laid out around a circular garden area. An iron railing and a rim of vegetation nicely isolated it from street traffic and neighboring houses.

  Bert grunted in appreciation as he joined her at the windows. "Doesn't come cheap, though. These people are doing all right to afford it."

  They toured the dining room and kitchen. At the back, a side hall led to the L of the house and opened to a rear stairwell, a bathroom, a small room that had probably been a servant's bedroom, and a room with built-in bookshelves that must have been the library. Cree listened inwardly for the tiny thrill or reverberation that would reveal the presence of an entity here, but all she got was a sense of a cheerful, pleasant house, full of golden light faintly tinged with the green of her own envy—this was exactly the kind of place she'd always wanted to live in.

  "You want to see upstairs? You think this is nice, they're almost done with the work up there, you can get a better idea. And the views, Jesus."

  "No. I get it. This is where people go when they die if they've been good all their lives. I'm jealous as hell. Let's go see the damned basement."

  She couldn't tell for sure, but she thought Bert was amused as he opened one of the doors in the rear hallway, fumbled for a light switch, and began stumping down the stairs.

  It was a long way down; even the basement had ten-foot ceilings. At the bottom, they stepped into a well-lit hallway that ran the full length of the house. Bert gave her a quick tour as they moved toward the room where the bones had been found. He slapped a light switch to reveal a gardening room, with brick floor and walls lined by redwood-plank potting tables; a dark stairwell led upward to slanted metal doors that Cree figured must open to the terrace. Next, a room with appliances, counters, cabinets, and a big wine rack, apparently used as a backup for the kitchen upstairs.

  "The new owners," Bert said, "I guess they like these well enough as is. It's
the end room they're going to fix up."

  At the end of the hall, he took down a ribbon of crime scene tape, then went ahead of her into the dark doorway. He groped in the shadows and turned on a contractor's lamp.

  This was the biggest of the basement rooms. The light cast hard shadows that amplified its disarray: sawhorses, dangling wiring, clamp lamps, sledgehammers, a stack of two-by-fours. To the left, carving the room into an L shape, a subsection had been partitioned with a brick wall that was now partially broken down.

  Bert turned on another lamp and tipped his chin toward the gap in the bricks. "So the plan was to fix this up as a rec room for the kids. But then they get to wondering why that part's partitioned off. The contractor figures it's maybe a feature left over from some earlier configuration, like a root cellar, and is just taking up space that could be put to better use. So they knock a little hole and see that it's an open chamber, half full of broken masonry and boards, and figure, great, more space for the rec room. They knock down part of the wall and start removing rubble. And start finding bones. They call SFPD, it's human remains, so it goes over to Homicide. I caught it because everybody figures it's just paperwork, I'll tie it off before I go."

  Cree leaned into the broken-edged doorway. It was a simple, rectangular room about twelve feet square. The cement floor was clear now, recently swept. All four walls were brick, including the main foundation.

  "So you come and take a look. What then?"

  "You find a body, you gotta go through the motions. I called in a crime scene unit, we excavated the rubble, removed the bones. We all knew what we were looking at. Medical examiner signed off on it as accidental and historical death. The ME would have held the bones for the obligatory year and then incinerated them, but I brought them over to Skobold's shop, see if we could find out more about him."

  Cree nodded. The enclosure exhaled a chalky, moist smell. She stepped into the near-darkness, looked around at the rough brick interior, and did her best to shift her sensorum, to listen to the silence and hear what might live within it. But besides the earthy, subterranean chill, the most palpable sensation was Bert's presence—his heavy, inscrutable, dour mood.

  "In my work," she said casually, "we find people are often reluctant to admit they've had an unusual experience that bothers them. They're always very relieved when we tell them it doesn't mean they're crazy or superstitious."

  Uncle Bert chortled. "Cree, kiddo—thanks for the thought, but don't try to finesse me here. I interview and interrogate people myself, that's half of what I do."

  She turned around and shared his smile. "Then you know when somebody's holding back on you. Why bother with this, Uncle Bert? Why call me?"

  He didn't answer. Instead, he came into the chamber and stood with arms crossed, blocking the light from the main room.

  "Lot of questions here. One of my first was, guy's buried in four or five feet of rubble, but the foundation's intact, looks original. Ceiling is intact, floor above that is intact. So where'd the rubble come from?"

  "Good question."

  Bert produced a small flashlight from his pocket and shined it at the ceiling, a solid panel of dark wainscoting. "See the color of the boards nearest the foundation? They're old, but they're a little newer than the others. I figure the quake knocked down stuff from above, a masonry wall or maybe a chimney, it broke through the floor upstairs, half-filled this little room. The owners back then repaired the ceiling and the floor up there, but left the debris where it was. Either didn't know our guy was in here, or didn't want to deal with him. Or didn't want anyone to know about him."

  Cree inspected the circle of light on the ceiling. On the terrace side, the varnish appeared paler, as if newer boards had been woven skillfully back into the darker, older ones.

  "Good point." She smiled again and then prodded: "But you're stalling me."

  He pulled back, affronted. "Whoa, little lady, maybe you better get straight about who's in charge here."

  She wasn't ready for his reaction, his tone, and threw some of it back at him: "Come on, Uncle Bert. Do you want help on this or not?"

  He stood mute, inhaling slowly as if he was inflating, looking furious with her. When he refused to answer, Cree felt her Irish come up, as Pop used to say. She pushed past him, and in the outer room she turned and half-sat on one of the saw-horses. Her heart was thumping, but she crossed her arms and kept a hard and expectant look on her face.

  Bert took his time coming out, but when he did she was relieved to see that little smile orphaned on his cheeks.

  "Ben Black's kid," he said. He shook his head, making a sucking noise through his side teeth. "I was about twice your pop's size, but he was twice as stubborn. Nobody pushed him around. I guess you got the gene."

  The smile was gone by the time he got to her. He put a big hand on her shoulder to urge her along with him.

  At the top of the stairs, Cree turned to watch Bert stump his way up, looking foreshortened as his thick hand clamped the bannister, slid ahead and clamped again, hoisting himself up.

  He puffed into the light and shut the door behind him. "See, way I figure it, there are two ways to retire. Main one is, you're heavy around the middle and you got flat feet you like to put up on your desk. You know your case load'U never resolve anyway, so why bust your ass for the last few months? You've been busting it your whole life, nobody's going to complain you're not pulling your weight. You know you'll hand off your open cases at the end, pick up your gold watch, and then you're, whatever, you're at home fondling the TV remote 'til the bagpipes play."

  Back in the kitchen, Bert opened a rear door and tipped his head to a flight of stairs that led down to the back corner of the terrace. Cree went out to a breeze that lifted her hair and tickled her cheeks, smelling of ocean and the exotic scent essence of northern California, eucalyptus. They walked together to the garden area in the middle of the terrace.

  Evening was settling over the city. In the light of a sun floating on the rim of the Pacific, the sky above the Golden Gate was a swirl of peach and pink, lavender and turquoise, that threw an opaline light on the water. On the far side, the hills were mounds of luminous pastels, cut with valleys of shadow; on this side, the city fell steeply away in a sweep of dimming pink and beige punctuated already by a few window lights. Behind Cree, the house was a Victorian jewel box, its facade warmed by the colors of the sky, windows reflecting back the dying sunlight.

  "And the other way?" she prompted. "The other way you retire?"

  "Yeah, the other way is you hold your head up, you follow through right to the end. You don't slow down, if anything you push it harder."

  "Why?"

  "Because you want to be proud when you're done. That's what you gotta live with from here on out, so you want to know you did the best you could. You don't do that, you've disrespected your job, you've basically said what you did all along was useless anyway." Bert sat on one of the benches, pulled out a cigarette but didn't light it. "So I get one more John Doe. We can incinerate him and write him up as a number, no fuss, I'm clear. Or we can give him a decent burial, say a few words, maybe put a name on his tombstone." He looked back at her challengingly. "That seem old fashioned to you?"

  "Old-fashioned conservative or bleeding-heart liberal."

  "I also knew Horace, how much he was gonna love getting his hands on this guy. Write a paper about him, maybe."

  "And you called me in because . . ."

  "Don't bother. There's no goddamned ghost, okay? Nobody to psychoanalyze, either. You deal with Bert Marchetti, what you see is what you get. I got no depths for you to plumb." Suggesting otherwise, his gestures had gotten vehement again. "I called you in because you're a licensed PI, you do historical research, and I could use the help. It's half a favor to Horace, he can use supporting data about this unusual specimen, but I got other cases to attend to. I also thought, with you I got a personal connection that'll help keep it confidential. Like Horace said, we don't want attention from screw
balls, and nobody will be happy we're spending our time or taxpayers' money on this—state's in a budget crisis, why do you think they elected the Terminator? This job is gonna be a lot of time-consuming work, up to your neck in newspaper morgues and historical libraries. Stuff that'll eat my clock when I got more recent dead people to deal with. And, yeah, I'm curious—how the rubble got in there, what really went down. Something fishy there."

  He glanced over to see how well she was buying it and must have seen that she wasn't, quite. "And, yeah," he went on quietly, "I figured, you know, the wolfman thing, that would be kind of up your alley."

  "You don't believe in ghosts . . . how about werewolves?"

  The eyes slitted again. "Aw, Jesus. This isn't about me, what I believe, what I don't, it's about some poor freak bastard who died and at the very least deserves not to be forgotten by everyone, every time! If you don't get that, I can't explain it. I don't believe in that crap. I don't believe in anything, okay? Except maybe, this much, this much"—he shook a thick forefinger and thumb, held a millimeter apart—"in getting my goddamned job done. Jesus, why are you asking me questions when the whole idea is for you to be telling me some answers?"

  Again his gestures had gotten bigger, and suddenly he stood up and strode off toward the house. "Fuck this. We don't have to do this. I made a mistake, calling you. Forget it. I'll pay for your flight, let's forget it. Give my regards to your mother. Let's go, I don't have all night here."

  His intensity seemed all out of proportion, his words a slap in the face. But after a stunned moment Cree realized she knew how to handle it, how to tough out the hard spots with Bert. It felt like family, like fights with Mom or Dee, the way you let the conflict go through you and over you and then just let go of it because you didn't have a choice; you'd wake up tomorrow and they'd still be there, you were stuck with them.