Both Ends of the Night Read online

  Thank God The Other Shoe was a weekly; the next issue wouldn’t come out till Friday.

  Ted said, “You okay, Shar?”

  “Yeah, just thinking about how much I dislike Jill Starkey.”

  “Me, too. She’s homophobic.”

  “I know. How does she find enough people in a city like this who will read her crap?”

  “As Grandma would say, there’s a top for every box.”

  I smiled at the malapropism. My mother has a new one almost every day. Sometimes I think she does it on purpose.

  “Seriously, though, we’ve got to do something about that blight on the building’s façade. This is one of the classics of its era.”

  Built in 1932, of carefully selected slabs of Vermont granite, the four-story office building had large float windows (as they called plate-glass back then) that allowed sun and moon and starshine to brighten its offices and corridors. The floors were made of beautifully tessellated hardwood, except on our fourth level, where a massive leak had necessitated carpeting. We leased the ground floor to stylish shops—leather goods, a high-end women’s shoestore, the legendary Angie’s Deli, and a sweet shop that I’ve been known to go around the block to avoid—and reserved two, three, four and the roof garden for our growing operation. The real heart of McCone & Ripinsky was the fourth floor and the roof garden.

  Fourth floor: Picture a big, well furnished waiting room with soft leather chairs and sofas, and rosewood tables covered with a wide variety of periodicals. Coffee, tea, you-name-it provided; drinks too if the client insisted. I think we stocked yak’s milk once for an extremely fussy client from the Middle East. And if any of them were hungry after long drives or international flights, Angie’s Deli provided.

  Sometimes I feel as if I’m running a catering service rather than an investigative agency. But then, I’ve been known to tack my food orders onto the clients’.

  Back to the offices: As with the building, I had mixed feelings about them. They were elegant—very, very elegant. Oriental carpets over the hardwood on floors two and three; deeply piled pale gray carpet on the fourth; something that lasted like Astroturf but seemed more like real grass on the roof. Attractive and functional contemporary furnishings throughout; posters from special events at the city’s museums brightening the pale gray walls. My own space was a dream: it had an expansive view from the Golden Gate to the East Bay hills, a huge cherrywood desk and matching bookcases and file cabinets; a full length sofa so I wouldn’t have to lie on the floor during my infamous “quiet times” (which often are not quiet).

  My ages-old armchair, years ago rescued from my office in a closet under the stairs at All Souls Legal Cooperative, where I’d begun my career, was now restored in leather; it and its newish matching hassock were positioned by the windows under a healthy potted schefflera plant named Mr. T., after Ted. The Grand Poobah, as he prefers to call himself, had decorated the suite single-handedly. Sometimes I regretted giving him such a free hand and open checkbook with the remodeling, but he has impeccable taste, and the results attest to it.

  Needless to say, I wasn’t used to such luxurious working environs. For years my agency’s offices were on the upper tier of Pier 24 ½, which was now in the process of being demolished, and I’d loved it there, drafty and cold and echoing as it was.

  Before that, I’d first had the coat closet and then an upstairs room at All Souls’ Legal Cooperative’s big Victorian in Bernal Heights, in the southeastern section of the city. The poverty law firm, headed by my best male friend, Hank Zahn, had subsisted in the big broken-down house, with some employees living in and others—mercifully, me—living out. But most of the friendships forged there had carried on to this day, and when the co-op folded, I’d managed to bring Ted along to my new agency. Hank and his wife and law partner, Anne-Marie Altman, had offices within two blocks of us. And the new people we’d acquired were all good fits.

  I didn’t miss the old days, not really. But I wasn’t used to such affluence. My family had been solvent, but just barely. I’d put myself through U.C. Berkeley on small scholarships and nighttime jobs as a security guard. The years after graduation were lean—who wanted a young woman with a B.A. in sociology? But then I’d gotten on with a private investigator, trained under my employer for my license, and landed the job with All Souls. After that things had slowly gotten better.

  Finally I’d met Hy Ripinsky. Man with a shady past who possessed a great deal of money of an equally shady origin, or so I’d thought at the time. The secrets of that past and money we’d sorted out over time, and I’d finally come to trust him. A couple of times, literally, with my life. After we married, I’d realized I was a wealthy woman, in more ways than just financially.

  I plunked my briefcase down on my desk, then studied it critically. It was getting shabby. I was having a bad hair day, and I realized that once again I’d forgotten to put on makeup.

  Well, old habits die hard.

  1:05 pm

  Ted buzzed me. “You’re not going to like this.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “You and Hy have a visitor. Gage Renshaw.”

  My breath caught and my pulse elevated. “…Gage—that can’t be! Hy and I assumed he died years ago.”

  “But you never received conclusive proof of it.”

  “No, but it’s been years since he disappeared. Knowing Gage, he would’ve turned up to devil us long before this. Are you sure it’s him?”

  “Turn on your surveillance cam and take a look.”

  I touched the switch. The grainy picture on the camera’s screen—not the best we should have bought—showed the reception desk; I moved the cursor to take in the rest of the room.

  The figure slumped on the sofa was Gage Renshaw, all right. Older, more rumpled than I remembered him, but still with that jet black hair with a white shock hanging down over his Lincolnesque forehead.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said.

  “What should I do with him?” Ted asked.

  “Throw him off the roof garden.”

  “Come on, Shar, this is serious. He’s smarmy and obnoxious as ever, and he’s demanding to see both you and Hy.”

  I thought quickly. “Take him to the hospitality suite.” A room off second-floor reception. “Offer him food, drink, whatever. Say Ripinsky and I are in conference, but we’ll be with him shortly.”

  “Will do. You want surveillance cams activated there, right?”

  “Yes.” I cut the connection, and then buzzed Hy.

  “I need you right away,” I told him. “One of our worst nightmares has just come true.”

  Hy and Gage Renshaw went way back, to the days when they were both flying highly questionable passengers and cargo in Southeast Asia, for an outfit called K-Air.

  As Hy had put it to me, he’d suspected but didn’t want to know for sure what K-Air was involved in; the planes were delivered to the pilots fully loaded and they didn’t even know their destinations until immediately before departure. There were a few times when he’d flown passengers concealed in the skin of the plane, meaning between the outer layer and the inside cabin. A good place to freeze to death, as one of his human cargo did. He’d parachuted contraband into far-flung places. Fellow pilots had disappeared into those places and were never seen again. It was a violent world, but he’d accepted it because he had very little to return to: his father, stepfather, and mother were dead; his stepfather had willed him a small sheep ranch in California’s high desert country near Tufa Lake, the region where he’d been born but was by no means home; he’d wandered for years, but never found a place that was home, and he assumed he never would.

  The turning point came when his regular flight plan was changed by the owner of K-Air from a city in Thailand called Chiang Mai to an abandoned village near the Laotian border. He was forced down into a clearing by one of his passengers—a druglord—where he was forced to witness a horrible massacre. That was it—Hy decided to get out (get clean, he’d said) and
return to the high desert country of California.

  In the years that passed, Hy became an environmentalist, married a fellow activist, and when he lost his wife to Multiple Sclerosis, he sank into a manic-depressive state that alarmed even those friends who’d always considered him a wild man. Then I’d appeared and our life together, while sometimes tumultuous, usually had a settled quality that neither of us had experienced before.

  Meanwhile, Renshaw and Kessell had returned stateside and formed RKI, an international executive protection firm. Basically what such firms do in this era of terrorist threats is contract with U.S. companies to provide security risk analysis, program design, and defensive training. They also have contingency services: crisis-management; ransom negotiation and delivery; and hostage recovery. They’d lured Hy into the firm as a hostage negotiator with promises of big bucks and short hours; the bucks had flown in, but long hours persisted, because Hy is as driven as I am when he’s on the trail of a solution to a crime.

  Dan Kessell had been murdered a few years ago, his killer never apprehended. I had my suspicions about the murder, all of them involving Renshaw. Later, Renshaw had totally disappeared, probably because one of his nefarious ventures went sour, and after a suitable time Hy had petitioned the court and been granted sole ownership of what was first known as Ripinsky International and now as McCone & Ripinsky International (an unfortunate appellation when referred to as MRI, conjuring up visions of X-ray rooms and white-coated technicians). But now it seemed Gage was back. And no doubt with plans, intended to mess up the whole arrangement.

  Copyright © 2016 Pronzini-Muller Family Trust

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Welcome

  Dedication

  Many thanks to:

  Epigraph

  PART ONE: November 22–23 Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  PART TWO: November 23–27 Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  PART THREE: November 28–December 1 Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  PART FOUR: December 3–5 Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  PART FIVE: December 7–25 Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  More Marica Muller

  About the Author

  Also by Marcia Muller

  Newsletters

  Copyright

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 1997 by Marcia Muller

  Cover copyright © 1997 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First published by The Mysterious Press

  First ebook edition: February 2016

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  ISBN 978-1-4555-6766-9

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