The McCone Files Read online

  “Salary?”

  “Low. Benefits, practically nil.”

  “I couldn’t live in; I’ve kind of o.d.’d on the communal stuff.”

  “We couldn’t accommodate you, anyway. The only available space is a converted closet under the stairs—which, incidentally, would be your office. I might be able to raise the salary a little to help with your rent.”

  “What about expenses? My car—”

  “Is a hunk of junk. But we’ll pay mileage. Besides…” he paused, eyes dancing wickedly, “I can offer you a first case that’ll intrigue the hell out of you.”

  A steady job, bosses who would leave me alone, a first case that would intrigue the hell out of me. What more was I looking for?

  “You’ve got yourself an investigator,” I told him.

  Hank’s client, Marnie Morrison, was one of those soft, round young woman who always remind me of puppy dogs—clingy and smiley and eager to please. A thinly veiled anxiety in her big blue eyes and the way most of her statements turned up as if she were asking a question told me that the puppy had been mistreated and wasn’t too sure she wouldn’t be mistreated again. She sat across from me at the round table and related her story—crossing and recrossing her blue-jeaned legs, twisting a curl of fluffy blond hair around her finger, glancing up at Hank for approval. Her mannerisms were so distracting that it took me a few minutes to realize I’d read about her in the paper.

  “His name, it was Jon Howard. I met him on the sorority ski trip to Mammouth over spring break. In the bar at the lodge where we were staying? He was there by himself and looked nice and my roommate Terry, she kind of pushed me into going over and talking. He was kind of sweet? So we had some drinks and made a date to ski together the next day and after that we were together all the time.”

  “Jon was staying at the lodge?”

  “No, this motel down the road. I thought it was kind of funny, since he told me he was a financier and sole owner of this company with holdings all over Europe and South America. I mean, the motel was cheap? But he said it was quieter there and he didn’t like big crowds of people, he was a very private person. We spent a lot of time there because I was rooming Terry at the lodge, and we did things like get take-out and drink wine?” Marnie glanced at Hank. He nodded encouragingly.

  “Anyway, we fell in love. And I decided not to go back to USC after break. We came to San Francisco because it’s our favorite city. And Jon was finalizing a big business deal, and after that we were going to get married.” The hurt-puppy look became more pronounced. “Of course, we didn’t.”

  “Back up a minute, if you would.” I said. “What did you and Jon talk about while…you were falling love?”

  “Our childhoods? Mine was good—I mean, my parents are nice and we’ve always had enough money. But Jon’s? It was awful. They were poor and he always had to work and he never finished high school. But he was self-taught and he’d built this company with all these holdings up from nothing.”

  “What kind of company?”

  Frown lines appeared between her eyebrows. “Well, a financial company, you know? It owned… well, all kinds of stuff overseas.”

  “Okay,” I said, “you arrived here in the city when?”

  “Two month ago.”

  “And did what?”

  “Checked into the St. Francis. We registered under my last name—Mr. and Mrs. Jon Morrison?”

  “Why?”

  “Because of Jon’s business deal. He’d made some enemies, and he was afraid they’d get to him before he could wrap it up. Besides, the credit card we were using was in my name.” Her mouth drooped. “The American Express card my father gave me when I went to college. I…guess that was the real reason?”

  “So you registered at the St. Francis and…?”

  “Jon was on the phone a lot on account of his business deal? I got my hair done and shopped. Then he hired a limo and a driver and we started looking at houses. As soon as the deal was finalized and his money was wire-transferred from Europe we were going to buy one. We found the perfect place on Vallejo Street in Pacific Heights, only it needed a lot of remodeling, we wanted to put in an indoor pool and a tennis court. So Jon wrote a postdated deposit check and hired a contractor and a decorator and then we went shopping for artwork because Jon said it was a good investment. We bought some nice paintings at a gallery on Sutter Street and they were holding them for us until the check cleared.”

  “What then?”

  “There were the cars? We ordered a Mercedes for me and a Porsche for Jon. And we looked at yachts and airplanes, but he decided we’d better wait on those.”

  “And Jon wrote postdated checks for the cars?”

  Marnie nodded.

  “And the rest went on your American Express card?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How much did you charge?”

  She bit her lip and glanced at Hank. “The hotel bill was ten thousand dollars. The limo and the driver were over five. And there was a lot of other stuff? A lot.” She looked down at her hands.

  I met Hank’s eyes. He shrugged, as if to say, “I told you she was naïve.”

  “What did your parents have to say about the credit-card charges?” I asked.

  “They paid them, at least that’s what the police said. Or else I’d be in jail now?”

  “Have you spoken with your parents?”

  She whispered something, still looking down.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that.”

  “I said, I can’t face them.”

  “And what about Jon?” I recalled the conclusion of Marnie’s tale from the newspaper account I’d read, but I wanted to hear her version.

  “A week ago? They came to our hotel room—the real-estate agent and decorator and the salesman from the gallery. The checks Jon wrote? They’d all bounced, and they wanted him to make good on them. Only Jon wasn’t there. I thought he’d gone downstairs for breakfast while I was in the shower, but he wasn’t any place in the hotel, he’d packed his things and gone. All that was left was a pink carnation on my pillow.”

  It was difficult to feel sorry for her; she had, after all, refused to recognize the blatant signs of a con job. But when she raised her head and I saw the tears slipping over her round cheeks, I could feel her pain. “So what do you want me to do, Marnie?”

  “Find him.”

  “Aren’t the police trying to do that?”

  She shook her head. “Since the checks were postdated they were only like…promises to pay? The police say it’s a civil matter, and all but one of the people Jon wrote them to have decided not to press charges. The decorator had already spent a lot of money out of pocket ordering fabric and stuff, so she hired a detective to trace Jon, but he’s disappeared.”

  I thought for a moment. “Okay, Marnie, suppose I do locate Jon Howard, What then?”

  “I’ll go to him and get the money to pay my parents back. Then I can face them again.”

  “It doesn’t sound as if he has any money.”

  “He must.” To my astonished look she added, “All of this has been a terrible mistake. Maybe he ran away because his business rivals were after him? Maybe the big deal he was working on fell through and he was ashamed to tell me? When you find him, he’ll explain everything.”

  “You sound as though you still believe in him.”

  “I do. I always will. I love him.”

  “She’s got to be insane!” I said to Hank. Marnie Morrison had just left for the cheap residential hotel that was all she could afford on her temporary office worker’s wages.

  “No, she’s naïve and doesn’t want to believe the great love of her life was a con artist. I figure meeting up with Jon Howard in his true incarnation’ll cure her of that.”

  “Then you actually want me to find him?”

  “Yeah. I’d like to get a look at him, find out what makes a guy like that tick.”

  As a matter of fact, so would I.

  The recession-hungr
y merchants who had been taken in by the supposedly rich young couple were now engaged in various forms of face-saving.

  Dealer Henry Richards of the Avant Gallery on Sutton Street: “Mr. Morrison was very knowledgeable about art. He asked all the right questions. He knew which paintings would appreciate and which would not. Had he followed through on the purchases, he would have had the beginnings of a top flight collection. He may not have been rich, but I could tell he was well educated, and there’s no concealing good breeding.”

  Realtor Deborah Lakein of Bay Properties: “From the moment I set eyes on the Morrisons I knew something was wrong. At first I thought it was simply the silk-purse-out-of-sow’s-ear effect: too much money, too little breeding. But they seemed serious and were very enthusiastic about the property—it’s a gem, asking price one million three. In this market one doesn’t pass up the opportunity to make such a sale. Of course his deposit check was postdated like the others he wrote all over town, and when I finally put it through it was returned for nonsufficient funds. The same was true of the checks to the contractor, decorator, and landscaper I recommended. Oh, I’m in hot water with them, I am!”

  Salesman Donald Neditch of European Motors on Van Ness Avenue’s auto row: “Well, our customers come in all varieties, if you know what I mean. You don’t have to a blueblood to test drive one of these babies. All you need is the cash or the credit. The two of them were well dressed—casually but expensively—and they arrived in a limo. I could tell they hadn’t had money for very long, though. He asked a lot of questions, but they were the kind you’d ask if you buying a preowned model. About used cars, he was knowledgeable enough to sell them, but I’d bet the Mercedes for his wife was the first new car he ever looked at.

  Claire Wallis, clerk in the billing office at the St. Francis Hotel: “No one questioned their charges because American Express was honoring them. There was a lot of room service, a lot of champagne and fine wines. Fresh flowers every day for the three weeks they stayed here. Generous tips added to each check, too. The personnel who had dealings with them tell me she was young and sweet; he was more rough at the edges, as you’d expect a self-made man to be, but very polite. Security had no complaints about loud partying, so I assume they were as well behaved in private as in public.”

  Wallis referred me to an inspector in the Fraud Division of the SFPD, who had taken a list of calls made from the “Morrisons’” suite and checked it out before it became apparent that no criminal statutes had been violated. The copy of the list the inspector provided me showed that Jon Howard had called car dealerships from San Rafael to Walnut Creek, a yacht broker in Sausalito, aircraft dealer nears SFO and Oakland Airport. The numbers for the real-estate agency and art gallery appeared frequently, as did those of the contractor, decorator, and landscaper. Restaurants, theater-ticket agencies, beauty shops, and a tanning salon figured prominently. There were no calls to Marnie Morrison’s parents, or to anyone who might have been a personal friend.

  By now I realized that Jon Howard had covered his tracks very well. I had no photograph of him, no descriptions beyond the one Marnie provided—and that was highly romanticized at best. I didn’t even know if he had used his real name. I made my way down to the list of places he’d called, though, visiting the yacht broker (“He didn’t know shit about boats”), the aircraft sales agencies (“I told him he’d better take flying lessons first, but he just laughed and said he had a pilot on call”), and all the auto dealerships—including Ben Rudolph’s Chevrolet in Walnut Creek, where Howard had called nearly every day, but no one had any recollection of either him or Marnie. Finally I reached Lou Petrocelli, driver for Golden West Limousine Service.

  “Sure, I got to know him pretty well, driving him around for almost three weeks,” Petrocelli told me. “He was…well, down-home, like a lot of the rock stars I’ve driven. When she came along he’d get in back with her and they’d hit the bar, watch some TV. When he was alone he’d hop up front and talk my ear off. Money, it was always money. Was this house in Pacific Heights a good investment? Did I think they oughta buy a van for the help to use for running errands? Which restaurants did the ‘in’ people eat at? Should he get season tickets for the opera? I thought it was funny, a guy who was supposed to be so rich and smart asking me for advice. He struck me as very insecure. But hell, I liked the guy. He was kind of wide-eyed and innocent in his way, and American Express was honoring the charges.”

  I asked Petrocelli to look over the list of establishments to which Howard had made phone calls. He confirmed he’d driven the couple to most of them, with the exception of the yacht brokers and the car dealership in Walnut Creek. They had traveled as far afield as the Napa Valley for wine tasting, and Marnie had insisted he share their hotel-catered picnic lunch. No, they’d never met with friends; Petrocelli didn’t think they’d known anyone in the city except the merchants with whom they had dealings.

  Around the time I reached the bottom of the list other cases began to claim my attention. I’d been ensconced long enough in the cubbyhole under the stairs that All Souls’ attorneys believed I was there to stay and began heaping my desk with tasks. They ranged from filing documents with the recorder’s office to serving subpoenas to interviewing a member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe about an accident he’d witnessed—no simple matter, since his replies to my questions were in pantomime. I made some effort on the Morrison case when I could, but Marnie had stopped calling to ask for reports. The last time I spoke with her she sounded so demoralized that three days later I stopped in at her hotel to see how she was doing; her room was empty, and the manager told me she’d checked out. Checked out in the company of a handsome young man driving an old Honda.

  Jon Howard?

  When I reported this latest development to Hank, he didn’t seem surprised. “I had a call earlier,” he said. “Some guy looking for Marnie. I was with a client, so Ted gave him her number.”

  “Then it probably was Howard. But how’d he know to call you?”

  Hank shrugged. “You’ve been asking around about him, leaving your card. He could have talked to the limo driver, the real-estate broker—anybody.”

  “And of course she went away with him.”

  “She said she still loved him.”

  “I wonder if he plans to pull the same scam in some other city.”

  “Doubtful; he doesn’t have her American Express card to bankroll it.”

  “What d’you suppose will happen to her?”

  Hank shook his head. “Let’s hope her dreams come true—whatever they might be.”

  A year later I added a follow-up note to the Marnie Morrison file: her parents, whom Hank had contacted following her disappearance, reported that they’d begun receiving periodic money orders for a hundred dollars apiece, mailed from various Bay Area cities. They were convinced they came from Marnie, in repayment of the credit-card charges. Since they’d long before paid the bill, they wanted to give Hank a message to pass on to their daughter, should she contact him.

  The message was that they loved her, she was forgiven and always welcome at home. Hank was never able to tell her.

  A couple of years after that I appended a newspaper clipping to the file: the Morrisons had been killed in a fire that swept the southern California canyon where their home was located. The article rehashed the bizarre scam their daughter and her boyfriend had perpetrated and mentioned the money orders. A further footnote to the story ran a while later: the money orders were now arriving at the office of the executor of the Morrisons’ estate, earmarked “for my parents’ favorite charity.”

  When I saw this last item, I was intrigued and wished I could take the time to locate Marnie. But in those early days at All Souls my caseload was heavy and soon I was caught up in other equally intriguing matters. The Morrison case still nagged at me, though; it was my first—and last—open file.

  MERRILL-GO-ROUND

  I CLUNG to the metal pole as the man in the red coat and straw hat pushed
the lever forward. The blue pig with the bedraggled whisk-broom tail on which it sat moved upward to the strains of “And the Band Played On.” As the carousel picked up speed, the pig rose and fell with a rocking motion and the faces of the bystanders became a blur.

  I smiled, feeling more like a child than a thirty-year old woman, enjoying the stir of the breeze on my long black hair. When the red-coated attendant stepped onto the platform and began taking tickets I got down from the pig—reluctantly. I followed him as he weaved his way through the lions and horses, ostriches and giraffes, continuing our earlier conversation.

  “It was only yesterday,” I shouted above the din of the music. “The little girl came in alone, at about three-thirty. Are you sure you don’t remember her?”

  The old man turned, clinging to a camel for support. His was the weathered face of one who spent most of his life outdoors. “I’m sure, Miss McCone. Look at them.” He motioned around at the other riders. “This is Monday, and still the place is packed with kids. On a Sunday we get ten times as many. How do you expect me to remember one, out of all the rest?”

  “Please, take another look at the picture.” I rummaged in my shoulder bag. When I looked up the man was several yards away, taking a ticket from the rider of a purple toad.

  I hurried after him and thrust the picture into the old man’s hand. “Surely, this child would stand out, with all that curly red hair.”

  His eyes, in their web of wrinkles, narrowed. He squinted thoughtfully at the photo, then handed it back to me. “No,” he said. “She’s a beautiful kid, and I’m sorry she’s missing, but I didn’t see her.’

  “Is there any way out of here except for the regular exit?”

  He shook his head. “The other doors’re locked. There’s no way that kid could’ve left except through the exit. If her mother claims she got on the carousel and disappeared, she’s crazy. Either the kid never came inside or the mother missed her when she left, that’s all.” Done collecting tickets, he leaned against a pony, his expression severe, “She’s crazy to let the kid ride alone, too.”