Deadly Anniversaries Read online

  There had been an unknown caller.

  Three years to the day. This wasn’t just any anniversary. Three years was the statute of limitations for grand theft. As of today, no prosecution was possible. She ran her fingers across Kath’s handwriting on the envelope, and picked up the item that had been wrapped in the headlines.

  A dog whistle.

  * * *

  APRIL 13

  BY MARCIA MULLER

  April 13. Anniversary number five. A ridiculous ritual, I admit.

  Normally I’m not a superstitious individual. Black cats don’t bother me—I have two. I skip happily under ladders, don’t eat an apple a day, and have broken more mirrors than I can remember. But I couldn’t get loose from this April thirteenth obsession.

  It was eleven in the morning. I’d cleared up all my paperwork, held a staff meeting, and conferred one-on-one with various of my operatives. Hy Ripinsky, my husband and partner in McCone & Ripinsky Investigations, was back east at our Chicago field office, and I had nothing urgent to share with him anyway. I wasn’t currently working a case myself. No reason to remain in my office in the M&R building. After all, I was the boss!

  But still I remained at my desk and turned to my computer, opened up the older case files section, and scrolled down to “Voss, Judith.” And there it was—the cold case that I’d reviewed obsessively every April 13 for five years now. Maybe this year something would stand out—a fact or scrap of information that I had somehow missed or failed to internalize before.

  * * *

  Judith Voss, according to her parents, had been one of those too-good-to-be-true daughters: the kind who make good grades—in her case, at SF State—never cause trouble in the home, date the appropriate boys, have ambitions appropriate to their family’s station in life. In fact, for them appropriate was a good word to sum up her character. She was conventionally pretty, excelled at soccer and swimming, wanted to be a physical therapist. In order to finance her higher education, she banked money from a part-time job clerking at a small flower shop near the home she shared with her parents in the inner Sunset District near Golden Gate Park. She claimed she loved San Francisco and would never leave it, but apparently she had.

  Five years ago on April 13, Judith had left home at 7:00 p.m., supposedly for a French club meeting. She went out the door calling out, “Goodbye, Mom, goodbye, Dad,” instead of her usual “See you later.” When she didn’t return by the time her parents normally went to bed, they didn’t think much of her absence. They assumed she had decided to stay over with a friend from the club, as she sometimes did. But when she hadn’t returned by late the next afternoon, Mrs. Voss called the friend and found there had been no club meeting; in fact, the friend hadn’t seen Judith in a month or more.

  The officers on SFPD’s Missing Persons detail hadn’t seen much cause for alarm. Young people disappeared in the city all the time; they usually turned up unscathed. Detectives went through the motions, which included contacting outlying jurisdictions, but finally concluded that Judith had left the city of her free will. She was over eighteen and had every right to come and go as she pleased—not like the decades-long plague of underage runaways who flocked to such places as the Haight, Taos, Seattle, New York, and Florida. The parents were referred to me by their attorney and they asked me to see if I could find something the police had missed. I tried for two weeks, but the record was straightforward; we finally terminated our professional relationship, and Judith remained missing.

  I’ve never considered any of my agency’s relatively few unsolved cases closed. Years ago when I’d been changing offices, I’d unearthed an open file that dealt with the disappearance of a young couple. I read it, put a couple of neglected facts together, and by night the couple were reunited with their families.

  That was why, every April 13, I picked through the Voss file. An exercise in futility so far.

  All the transcripts of my interviews were there, starting with my clients, the parents. Emily Voss was blonde, thin, and nervous; her fingers picked at her clothing and she constantly twisted her wedding ring. I suspected the nervousness was habitual rather than related to the problem at hand. When she spoke of her daughter, I heard a wisp of envy in her voice: “Judy was so smart—she could achieve whatever she wanted to in her life. She wouldn’t be ordinary...” At that point she let her words trail off and glanced at her husband. His thick lips twisted, acknowledging the unsaid, “Ordinary like me.”

  Doug Voss, stocky in his neatly pressed chinos and checked sport shirt, was a high school basketball coach. His big hands swooped around as he talked. “That girl, there’s no way she’s in serious trouble. I trained her well. She’s strong, got her head together. Whatever she’s up to, she’s got a reason.”

  “You think she disappeared deliberately?” I asked.

  He nodded. “That girl, she’s up to something, is what I say.”

  Judith hadn’t had many friends—“Too competitive,” her father claimed—but I interviewed them all. And they all offered opinions that conflicted with her parents’ views.

  Nancy Melton told me, “Judy could be a lot of fun. She had a wild side. Nothing dangerous, just pranks. Like stealing her boyfriend’s jock from his gym locker and leaving it on the math teacher’s desk.”

  “Judy dated a lot,” a former boyfriend, Gary Cramer said. “You wanted some, you knew where to get it. She loved to fuck, the more the better.”

  “She was a very spiritual person,” Cindy Stafford remarked. “It was always up to God. ‘God’s gonna get me for this.’ ‘God’ll handle this problem.’”

  Art Gallo commented, “Girl knew—and used—more swearwords than I do.”

  The friend who had the most penetrating insights into Judith Voss was classmate Barbie Jennings, a big, graceless woman in bib overalls and a T-shirt who, in the course of our talk at her apartment, tripped over a hassock, bruised her upper arm on the corner of a bookcase, and knocked over a tall stack of paperback books.

  From the Jennings transcript:

  BJ: If you asked me to come up with one word that described Jude, I’d say it would be wanting, as in aching for stuff. She needed... I don’t know what she needed. But whatever it was, she wasn’t going to get it on a physical therapist’s salary.

  SM: She wanted something in a monetary sense?

  BJ: Yeah. It’s like what we used to do on Sundays sometimes when the real estate ads came out. Jude would go over the open homes section and circle ones that looked good. Then we’d go tour them.

  SM: You weren’t thinking of buying or renting?

  BJ: God, no. Even back then, the prices were outrageous. And the places she wanted to look—Cow Hollow, Pacific Heights, Russian Hill—were out of sight. I asked her once why didn’t we look at inexpensive condos or apartment rentals. Maybe something nice would turn up and we could go halves on it. She said no. The way things were, she’d have to go it alone.

  SM: The way things were?

  BJ: Yeah. I asked her what she meant, but she just smiled like I was supposed to know.

  SM: Did she have a boyfriend—this Gary Kramer, for instance—whom she might’ve been planning on moving in with?

  BF: Did she have a boyfriend? Who-eee! Guys were calling all the time, but as far as I knew she didn’t go with any one for very long. And she didn’t talk about them.

  SM: No one steady at all?

  BJ: No. She’d say, “He’s strictly temporary” or “I can’t be bothered with him.” That was it. Once, not long before she disappeared, she found a house she really liked on Russian Hill. It was an odd little place, but she was very taken with it. As she was looking around I heard her mutter, “This would be perfect for—” and then she saw me looking at her and smiled in that weird, secret way she had and refused to talk about it. After that...well, I decided she wasn’t much of a friend, and we saw less of each other. Then suddenly she was
gone, and I never heard from her again.

  Next I looked at the transcripts of my talks with Judith’s teachers.

  Lynda Holman, English literature, found Judith “very studious. Most of the kids, well, you see vacant stares and you know they’re far away, into something else entirely. But I’d be giving a lecture on Chaucer—which even bored me—and I’d catch Judy watching me with an intense look, almost as if she wanted something more from me. But the few times I called on her and asked, ‘Yes, Judy?’ she waved the question aside.”

  Mark Bolton, statistics, had a similar take on her: “Most students take my courses to satisfy a requirement for a program like the MBA, but Judy was into them for the content. She wanted to know what statistics could do for her, personally. It’s hard to say why, but it was as if she was working on a problem and needed proof of the solution.”

  Emma Carpenter, biology, said, “When she disappeared, I thought, ‘Well, isn’t that just like her.’ I mean, she was so remote. She performed the class and lab work all right, but she was...well, mechanical. Just filling up space until she could get to what was really important to her.”

  Valerie Mott, women’s athletic director, commented, “God, could that girl run.” Then she smiled and shook her head. “Sorry, the pun was unintentional. But I guess that’s what this is all about—she ran, and nobody ever knew why.”

  More transcripts. Older people, friends and associates of Judith’s parents, all of whom had widely varying opinions of her.

  “I wish I had a kid like her.”

  “Sneaky.”

  “Sincere.”

  “Very helpful to her mother.”

  “I don’t think she was very close to her father.”

  “Physical therapist? I thought she wanted to be an interior decorator, or do something in real estate.”

  “She wouldn’t just up and run away. She’s got to be dead. Someday they’ll find her body in a ditch someplace.”

  “She gave off a strange sexual aura.”

  “She went out with my son Jeff. Just a few dates. He found her boring.”

  “I never caught her in a lie, but she sometimes seemed untruthful.”

  “Gossipy—but most of what she talked about was untrue. I wouldn’t be surprised if she made it all up.”

  “She made me uncomfortable.”

  “I’m not sure that there wasn’t something abnormal about the girl.”

  “Flirtatious? Yes. But a lot of girls like to flirt with older men. And we like them to flirt.”

  “Bright. She could hold up her end of conversations on many complicated issues.”

  “Poised and socially at ease.”

  More of the same from the Vosses’ neighbors:

  “She’d sneak out of the house in the middle of the night,” Mrs. Polly Gilbert said. “I know because I’m unwell and sit up in my chair next to our bedroom window most of the time. There’d usually be this man waiting for her.”

  “A man, not a boy?” I asked.

  “I’m sure I’d know the difference.”

  “Can you describe him?”

  “Not very well. Just tall and well built.”

  “Did you hear them talking? Maybe she mentioned his name.”

  “Talk? The two of them? Not hardly.”

  * * *

  “Yes, I’d see Judy slipping out of the house all the time,” an elderly woman who wouldn’t give me her name told me. “Out the window, and gone. It’s lucky that’s a one-story house. If she’d had to climb down a drainpipe, she might’ve broken her neck.”

  * * *

  “Men? Nonsense!” Mrs. Olivia Johnson shook her head vehemently. “They weren’t all men. Some of them were teenagers, too.”

  “Do you remember any of them?”

  “Well, the man who came the most, he had a red Porsche—one of the old ones that look like an upside-down spoon—that he’d park down the street, and then he’d lean against the car, bold as brass. She’d go to him, and they’d take off. I can still hear the sound of that car growling away into the night.”

  “When was this?”

  “It went on for four months, right before Judith disappeared.”

  “Did you ever overhear any conversation between them? The man’s name, for instance?”

  “No.”

  “What about the car’s license plate?”

  “It was in-state. But I didn’t notice the numbers. I’ve never been good with numbers.” She shook her head and added, “I warned my Margaret to stay away from the Voss girl. Her midnight escapades set a bad example. Let’s just say that Judith Voss never came around here selling Girl Scout cookies.”

  * * *

  That first April 13, the grown man with the red Porsche had seemed my only starting point. From my contact at the Department of Motor Vehicles, I learned that there were twenty-three such models in the Greater Bay Area that had been licensed over five years previously. Nine of them I could rule out because they were registered to women. Two were on planned nonoperation. Another had been in a wreck and consigned to the junkyard.

  Ten cars, then, in various locations around the area.

  I’d begun by phoning.

  Owner #1 had been deceased for over a year. “I just can’t get around to selling that Porsche,” his widow said.

  Owner #2 had been in Thailand on sabbatical five years ago. “Car was up on blocks in his garage,” his secretary told me. “He made me go over and check on it once a month. That’s how much he loved that car.”

  Owner #3’s phone was disconnected.

  Owner #4 had moved to Utah.

  Two more deceased owners. At the second number a woman said, “I always told my husband that car would be the death of him.”

  Owner #7 was annoyed. “I sold it to a kid a year ago. Don’t tell me he didn’t reregister it!” Apparently he hadn’t.

  Three owners to go. None of them answered the phone. I decided to wait until evening, then show up at their addresses.

  Eldon McFeeney lived in a bad section of Oakland: men wearing gang colors congregated around a corner drugstore; most of the dilapidated houses had security gates on the doors and windows, while others were boarded up. I parked in front of the McFeeney garage and mounted the rickety stairs to knock. In a few moments, when I’d just about given up on getting a reply, a skinny black man on crutches answered. His skin was dry and clung to his fragile-looking cheekbones; his hair had receded to two small spots above his large ears; a strong odor of alcohol surrounded him.

  “Yes, what is it?” he asked.

  I handed him one of my cards. He looked at it, shook his head, and muttered something that sounded like, “What next?”

  “I’m interested in the Porsche 912 you have registered under your name,” I said.

  “The Porsche...that’s not mine. Can you see an old wreck like me driving that baby?” He smiled faintly. “It’s my younger brother’s, registered in my name because...well, Donny has trouble with traffic cops. They took his license away permanently years ago.”

  “How many years?”

  “Seven? Eight? My memory’s not so good.”

  “Does Donny live here with you?”

  “No, ma’am. I don’t know where he crashes these days. The car lives with me—he’s too messed up to drive it.”

  “How long has the Porsche been living with you?”

  “Five years. It needs a lot of work, but since I don’t drive it, I’m not putting any money into it.”

  “Does your brother drive it at all?”

  “Not since he parked it in my garage. I suppose I’ll get around to selling it when he...goes.”

  I knew what he meant by “goes.” I myself had had a brother who died of drug addiction.

  Arthur Harris, the next Porsche owner, was an entrepreneur of sorts. His office wa
s a cubicle in a shared workspace in an old building on Fourth Street south of Market. The lettering on the door said Entertainers Collective.

  The cubicle was tiny: a single desk and two chairs, one of which was piled with files, and a bookcase full of reference works that were mostly collapsed on one another. Harris himself was fifty at the outside and energetic, judging from the way he sprang from his chair when I entered. His blond handlebar mustache twitched as he examined my card, and he then studied me with keen blue eyes.

  “I don’t believe this,” he exclaimed. “A private eye masquerading as an entertainer. What is it you do—act, sing, play the xylophone?”

  “None of the three.” I took the chair he indicated. “Actually, this is an inquiry about a disappearance. Are you familiar with the name Judith Voss?”

  Pause. “Can’t say as I am. Does she act, sing—”

  “No, and she doesn’t play the xylophone. I understand you own a red Porsche 912, license number—”

  “So what if I do?”

  “And you’ve owned it since...?”

  “Oh, maybe seven years. What the hell does that matter?”

  “Judith Voss had a friend who owned one. She was seen with him shortly before she disappeared last month.”

  “Well, that friend wasn’t me.”

  “I see. I’m curious—what exactly is it you do, Mr. Harris?”

  He began fiddling with objects on his desk—a stapler, letter opener, calculator. “I’m an agent—I put my clients together—actor with director, scriptwriter with producer, that sort of thing.”

  “And you take a fee from them?”

  “Of course.”

  “Sounds like interesting work. How long have you been doing this?”

  “Forever, it seems. At least fifteen years.”

  “Would I know any of your clients?”

  He hesitated. “Well, there’s Sandra Adams and Kiki Charles and Lissa Sloane.”

  I’d never heard of them.