Skeleton in the Closet Read online

  “Odd floor plan. I suppose it was altered for its present use.”

  “Right. Anyway, Ella and Charles preferred an apartment on Nob Hill, and after his death she remained there, showing no interest in remarrying. She was always escorted to events by what they called a walker.” Meaning a young man of decent background, no interest in women, and with the social graces to be acceptable among the high-toned and wealthy.

  “She used the house only for her ‘spiritual activities,’ ” Ted added.

  Meaning séances. “Any idea how she got into those, Mick?” I asked.

  “None that I could find.”

  If Mick couldn’t find it, nobody could. “What about the Fourth Dimension?”

  “Lots more info.”

  The Fourth Dimension had been founded ten years ago by Hobart Devine, whose inflated oratory I’d been privileged to hear the night before. A minister from a small town in the Central Valley, he’d been dismissed from his small, nondenominational congregation, but Mick could find no reason for his removal. Devine and his wife, Shirley, gravitated to San Francisco, somehow struck up a friendship with Ella Whitcomb, and soon he emerged as the chief “facilitator” of the Fourth Dimension.

  The Fourth Dimension was a sect that believed the past, present, and future were intermingled in another world. Its adherents could, with the help of facilitators, move from one time frame to the other and thus see the “great picture of life.” Many things were possible, including altering the course of one’s own life or even the world’s history.

  Okay. But what did all of this nonsense have to do with the skeleton in the closet?

  Mick and I set to work finding out about the previous tenants of the blue building. The dot com firm had been there five years until they’d gone bust. I got the revived company’s new number and called them.

  “That place on Tel Hill?” Jim Terry, CEO, said. “No, we never asked Ms. Connors about its current availability.”

  “A real-estate agent’s come-on. I thought so.”

  “Frankly, we never would have asked to return there,” Terry added. “For one thing there was this weird woman who would come around, snooping and claiming she was the owner.”

  But the owner was a man living in Oregon. “Would you describe her, please?”

  “Dark hair that was obviously a wig, very pale, kind of witchy looking with heavy makeup. Always wore a shapeless wool coat no matter what the weather was like.”

  “You ever learn her name?”

  “No.”

  “Anything else you can tell me about her?”

  “Well, one thing—I think she had a key to the building. We had pretty tight security—we were dealing with some sensitive accounts. So we kept her out during business hours. But little things kept turning up disturbed when we came to work some mornings.”

  “As if she’d been inside during the night?”

  “Right.”

  I asked him to ask his employees if they remembered anything more about the woman and have them call me if they did. He said he would.

  Mick had gone back to his office when I began making my calls; now he knocked on my doorframe and came in. “I just talked with Audrey Bannon, the fashion designer whose company leased the blue building for ten years before the dot commers. She said Ella Whitcomb turned them out because she wanted to use the place for her ‘spiritual activities.’ They didn’t fight the eviction because, as Bannon claims, Whitcomb didn’t provide routine maintenance or make major repairs.”

  “Building’s in good shape now. Kirby Travis is a responsible property manager.”

  Ted looked around at my half-packed boxes. “Those have to be ready by Monday, you know.”

  “They will be.”

  “Having trouble letting go?”

  “Not anymore. I’m having trouble with where I’m going.”

  Saturday had nightmarish overtones. Hy and I packed the contents of my office for what seemed like an endless length of time. I couldn’t believe what I’d managed to stuff into such a relatively small space. The armoire where I stored emergency clothes, makeup, and other miscellany was the worst: raingear of various sorts, worn-out boots, a black knit dress that hung baggy on its hanger and doubtless would hang worse on me. Lopsided scarves crocheted by my sister Patsy’s daughters, gift hats that I wouldn’t be caught dead in, two pairs of ripped jeans.

  I hauled it all out and left it on the floor for the demolition crew.

  Now for the cabinet beside the big parson’s table that I used as a desk: pens and stubby pencils and dried-up markers. Letter openers and unusable erasers and double-sided tape that had never worked. A McCone County, Montana, sheriff’s deputy badge that a friend on the department there had sent me. I put the badge in my pocket, and the rest went on the floor.

  Finally I sagged against the parson’s table, motioned at the packed cartons, and said to Hy, “The movers will be here on Monday.” Motioned at the debris on the floor and added, “Let the wreckers take that.”

  The next morning I woke up depressed. I didn’t feel any better after I’d finished showering and dressing.

  “Where’re you going?” Hy asked, as I headed toward the stairs. “I have to leave for LA in a few hours.”

  “Something I have to do.” I kissed him, wished him a good trip, and left.

  The blue house was Sunday-quiet, its big rooms echoing with emptiness. I moved through it slowly, looking for indications of its past before Ella Whitcomb had turned it into a place for visitations from other worlds. The room that would be my office yielded nothing, as did the two middle floors. The walls of the living room were covered by dark blue wallpaper with gold depictions of the solar system. Probably where Ella Whitcomb had held her séances. A big piece of it was coming down. Out of curiosity I tugged at it and discovered that it was actually two layers; the second was printed with old-fashioned little flowers and crumbled when I touched it. Underneath it the walls were painted in plain colors—light blue over pale green and a sickly yellow.

  I was planning to have the interior painted anyway. So I pulled off more of the paper, then stepped back to view the wall.

  A dark pattern showed faintly through the blue paint. I took out my Swiss Army knife and scraped it down to the green. The pattern grew darker. Again I scraped: darker yet. The pattern was consistent with blood spatters.

  Had the woman whose body had lain in the bench all these years been killed here in this room? Maybe so. But that didn’t explain who she was or who had stabbed her.

  And what about the dark-haired woman who claimed to be owner of the building and apparently had a key?

  I found out the answer to that question much sooner than I’d expected.

  A key rattling in the front door lock startled me. I sat up on the nest of car blankets I’d made on the living room floor and glanced at my watch: nearly three o’clock. I must have been dozing. A bulky woman’s shape was tiptoeing down the hall. I moved to the archway and peered after her. She stopped at the bench, made a moaning sound, and when she lifted the lid, she said in a husky, sad voice, “Oh, Blanche, it’s true.”

  She was a heavy woman in a shapeless dark coat and thick makeup, with tangled black hair that had to be a cheap wig. At first when she turned I didn’t recognize her. Then I realized it was Shirley Devine.

  “Who’s that?” she said.

  “Sharon McCone. We met at the Fourth Dimension.”

  “What’re you doing here?”

  “What are you doing here, dressed like that?”

  No answer.

  I said then, “I hold the current lease on the building.”

  “What? You can’t. It’s mine.”

  “Yours?”

  “The Fourth Dimension’s.”

  “I’m afraid not. The owner is Mrs. Whitcomb’s nephew.”

  “No, it’s mine. Ours. It and everything inside it.”

  The woman had been listening to too many of her husband’s whacked-out orations.

&n
bsp; She added, “It’s true what the newspapers say, isn’t it? That you found her and took her away.”

  “Found who?”

  “Blanche? It must be Blanche.”

  “Blanche who?”

  “Ella told me about her. I don’t know how she knew, but she did. After she discovered Blanche’s body, she couldn’t stand to live here. I thought that was unfair, because Blanche was why Ella held her séances here. Because of the emanations coming from Blanche and the Fourth Dimension.” She paused, frowning. “I don’t feel them anymore. It’s your fault, you had her taken away.”

  The woman’s sudden lunge caught me unaware. She slammed me into the frame of the archway. My breath caught, then whooshed out, and I struggled for air. The Devine woman’s large, strong hands were at my throat. I grasped them, trying to break her hold, but she went on squeezing. I kicked out, connected with one of her sturdy legs, and then bit her on the bared portion of her arm.

  She howled and let go, clutching her wounded limb. Then she pulled the overcoat’s sleeve down and ran for the door. I was in no shape to go after her, my legs rubbery, my breath coming in gasps. As I slid down the wall to the floor, I heard her steps pounding along the street.

  Mick and his woman friend Alison lived in the Millennium Tower—a huge blue-glassed structure that hovered over the South of Market—but Mick still maintained his small loft not too far from Pier 24½. No one was home at the condo, so I looked for and found him at the loft, doing something at one of the computers that took up most of the space.

  “You look like hell,” he said. “Where have you been—in a bar brawl?”

  “Next best thing.” I let myself gingerly down on the mattress next to his workstation and swivel chair. “D’you mind running a search for me?” I asked.

  “Nope. What’re we looking for?”

  “A long dead person named Blanche.”

  “The woman in the bench?”

  “Maybe.”

  Mick’s search through property and other legal documents took us back to the 1890s and a notorious madam named Blanche Carey who had operated a house of ill repute in the Sly Lane area. Carey had vanished in 1894, and it was assumed that she’d run off with her pimp and strongman, Joe Richards. Photographs of Carey posted by an amateur historian on the Internet showed her wearing the same type ruffled dress and onyx brooch as the skeleton.

  Our building, I reasoned, must have been where she ran her business back then, and Ella Whitcomb had known about it. Someone—maybe her pimp—stabbed Carey and hid her body in the bench. Once that was closed off, he’d repainted the blood-spattered front room wall, several times, probably, as the stains continued to show through.

  But what was Shirley Devine’s connection with all this? And why was she haunting the premises?

  Mick, the wizard, managed to access an old membership roster of the Fourth Dimension from a link on their website. He and I began phoning those we could get numbers for in the late afternoon. Most knew about Whitcomb’s séances, and many had attended them. Of the latter, a few sounded in full possession of their faculties: curiosity seekers who’d left half believing or not believing at all. And then there were the others…

  “She fulfilled a dream for me, reunited me with my Alfred. He’s with me still, every day.”

  “There was a presence in that house, and she allowed me to speak with my departed loved ones.”

  “She’s a benign witch. You know, that’s the best kind.”

  “I needed to believe in something after my Katie died. I needed it.”

  “She gives needy people like me a reason to go on.”

  But none of them could tell us anything we didn’t already know about Shirley Devine. The one thing all the believers had in common was need. Whitcomb had sensed that need and exploited it for her own profit. And it seemed obvious to me that the Devines had abetted her. They were show people and knew all the tricks of the trade. Shirley’s insistence that the house belonged to the Fourth Dimension indicated that Whitcomb might have promised it to the group. What had changed her mind?

  Hobart Devine said, “You must forgive my wife. I’m sure she didn’t mean to harm you. She… hasn’t been herself lately.”

  We were seated in his office behind the theater where the group conducted its sessions. It was a curiously efficient setup for a member of the lunatic fringe.

  “Why does she think the house in Sly Lane belongs to you?”

  “Ella—Mrs. Whitcomb—promised it to us. Then she reneged, but Shirley refuses to believe she would do that.”

  “Why does she keep trespassing on the property?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does the name Blanche Carey mean anything to you?”

  “Who?”

  “The woman whose skeleton was found in the building.”

  He shook his head. “The name means nothing to me.”

  “Were you aware that there was a skeleton hidden in that bench?”

  “No.”

  “Do you believe the building belongs to the Fourth Dimension?”

  “Certainly not. It was disappointing that Mrs. Whitcomb willed it to her nephew, but in a way I was relieved; we simply couldn’t have afforded the upkeep.”

  Of course Shirley Devine refused to talk to me. Locked herself in a dressing room off the small stage area and wouldn’t come out. I quizzed Mr. Devine some more, but to no avail; he kept claiming not to be privy to the workings of his wife’s mind. He also said he had no idea why Mrs. Whitcomb had gone back on her promised bequest.

  The will had been probated, so now it was a document of public record. I sent Mick to City Hall, and he returned with a copy. As wills go, it was a simple one: all assets to the Fourth Dimension, except for the house, which her nephew received free and clear, the taxes prepaid for the next ten years. The will was dated three years prior to Whitcomb’s death and replaced an earlier will from 1999. Its executor was Kirby Travis.

  I phoned Mr. Travis at his office in Medford. “That earlier will?” he said. “It left everything to me.”

  “Did you object to the change?”

  “No. It was Aunt Ella’s money, and she had the right to do as she wanted with it. I didn’t like this Fourth Dimension stuff, but she was a believer.”

  “The man at the Fourth Dimension claims she told them about the change.”

  “I’m sure she did. No one there seemed surprised when I probated it.”

  I asked a question that I should have asked much earlier. “Exactly how did your aunt die?”

  “In an accident. She and Shirley Devine were on their way down the coast to a meeting in Half Moon Bay, and the car went off the cliff at that bad stretch at Devil’s Slide. Shirley was thrown free, but Ella was killed.”

  I pictured the road: steep, treacherously winding above rocky outcroppings in the sea below, without guardrails on many curves. They’d recently built a tunnel to bypass it, but back then it was a driver’s nightmare.

  And a good place to commit murder.

  I started with the San Mateo County sheriff’s deputy who had handled the case, Pete Martinez. “Yeah, I remember it well,” he told me. “Poor woman in the passenger seat didn’t stand a chance. The lady driving was damned lucky the door sprung and she was tossed out by the roadside. As it was, she spent a month in the hospital and rehab.”

  “Any chance it wasn’t an accident?”

  “Nothing to indicate it wasn’t. No cuts in the brake line, no punctures in the tires. The car was a brand-new Chrysler, had only a few hundred miles on it.”

  “Exactly what were Mrs. Whitcomb’s injuries? Could she have been knocked out, unconscious, when the car went over?”

  “She could have, I guess. No way to tell if so. The body was pretty badly banged up after that three-hundred-foot fall down the cliff.”

  I got the coordinates for the exact place the accident had happened from the deputy and drove down there. The bypass tunnel was scheduled to open soon between the coastal towns
of Montara and Half Moon Bay, and Caltrans—the state agency responsible for highway, bridge, and rail transportation planning, construction, and maintenance—was putting the final touches to it.

  About time, I thought as I passed the construction sites. The current road had been constructed in the mid-1930s and had been subject to landslides and fatal accidents. About fifteen years ago, it had been closed by a slide for more than 150 days, at a cost to the taxpayers of over three million dollars.

  I pulled off onto the unpaved turnout where Ella Whitcomb’s car had gone over. There was no guardrail, but the turnout was wide enough that a car could have easily been stopped before going over the cliff. I parked and got out, the chill wind whipping my hair around and making me hug my jacket closer. It was a clear, crisp late December day; the sea sparkled aqua in the shallows where the waves kicked up sand, cobalt blue with small whitecaps in the depths.

  I stepped close to the cliff’s edge and looked down. Sheer sandstone to the granite boulders below. High tide: whitewater sprayed up, then fell and receded. A dangerous place. But to stage a fatal accident, a person would need to know it very well.

  The Caltrans director was a man I was well acquainted with, from back when the agency’s subcontractor had accidentally cut the waterline of our well at Touchstone while resurfacing Highway One. When I called him he said in mock horror, “What did we sever now, Ms. McCone?”

  “Nothing—that I know of.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  I named the date Whitcomb had gone over the cliff. “Did you have crews working on the southern end of the Devil’s Slide bypass tunnel around that date?”

  “I believe we did. I’ll check and get back to you.”

  “Sure,” Pete Brinker of NorCal Construction said, “we had a command station not far from the turnout you’re talking about.”

  “Command station?”

  “You know—telephones, computers, support personnel.”

  “So anybody who was working there was in a position to notice odd goings on in the area?”

  “Like what?”

  “Suspicious persons or activity.”