Ask the Cards a Question Page 3

  As I came downstairs, Ted signaled that I had a call. I followed one of the red cords down the hall until I located a phone on a bookcase. I’d often suspected that the folks at All Souls favored twenty-five-foot cords so they could abandon the instruments in peculiar places.

  Linnea’s hysterical voice assaulted my ear. “Sharon! Sharon, you won’t believe what Tim just told me!”

  “I already know, Linnea. I was planning to call you.”

  “Call me? You couldn’t tell me in person? I assume you came home last night.”

  “You’re right, I did come home. But I had to go out early, and I didn’t want to disturb you.”

  “Didn’t want to disturb me? You think I’m not disturbed now? Being told about a murder by that grinning, leering tub of guts?”

  “Linnea, that’s no way to talk about Tim.”

  “I’ll talk any way I please. Oh, my God, Sharon! Molly said the cards were to blame. The fortune teller…” She began to sob.

  Molly had evidently taken the prophecy seriously. “Look, Linnea, I know how you feel. I feel terrible. I’m going to talk to the police…”

  “The police!”

  Her shriek made me hold the receiver away from my ear. “Well, to Greg Marcus. You know – the cop that sends me all the chocolate, the one you’ve never met.”

  “What good is that going to do?”

  “I’ll find out what they know so far.”

  “And, in the meantime, what do I do?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Here I sit, in your crummy apartment, all cooped up and scared to death.

  The reference to my apartment stung, but I controlled my voice. “Look, Linnea, why don’t you get out of there? Go for a walk. It’s a beautiful day.”

  “Go for a walk, with a maniac on the loose? Are you crazy?”

  I sighed. “Okay, do what you like. I’ll be home as soon as I can get there. Maybe I’ll have some news by then.”

  “Oh, great!”

  “And Linnea, try not to…” I paused.

  “Try not to what?”

  I had been about to tell her not to hit the bottle again, but I knew it would only provoke another outburst. “Try not to worry,” I finished lamely.

  “Oh, sure.” There was a click, and the line went dead.

  I set the phone down and leaned against the bookcase, thinking. Linnea’s hysteria seemed genuine, not the reaction of someone with something to hide. The problem was, how much did she remember of what she did when drunk? She had confessed to alcoholic blackouts in recent weeks.

  “Something has to be done about this situation,” I said aloud. “Something has got to be done.”

  4.

  At one o’clock I pulled up in front of the massive stone block that was the Hall of Justice. I watched as Greg ambled down the steps, admiring his trim body which, at forty-two, was still fit as an athlete’s. Greg was good company, and, in Hank’s words, managed to piss me off totally on the average of once a week.

  “Good afternoon.” Greg opened the car door and got in. Quickly he reached into his coat pocket and tossed a bag of Hershey kisses in my lap.

  “Dammit! You promised!”

  “I did nothing of the kind.”

  “I’ll get fat.”

  “Good. Then you’ll have to start seeing me again because no one else will have you.”

  I sighed and pulled away from the curb.

  “Where are you taking me, by the way?” Greg asked.

  “I thought we’d try Delores Park.” I named the grassy slope across from Mission High School.

  “That’s fine by me. If I really cared, I could probably nab a few dope pushers during lunch. But that would mean more paperwork.”

  “And I know how you hate paperwork.” I shot through a space between a MUNI bus and a police car and headed back toward my neighborhood.

  The park was dotted with loungers, many of them shirtless, spread-eagled to receive the warm rays. Teenaged couple from the school strolled about in ambulatory embraces whose maintenance required ballet-like precision. As we spread my car blanket at the top of the hill, Greg said,

  “Ah, if only you would walk in lockstep and talk of love with me!”

  I laughed. Greg’s bantering had begun to ease the tension I’d felt over this, our first real time together since our quarrel. I sensed he wouldn’t press the issue seriously today.

  We finished arranging the blanket, and Greg burrowed through the bag from the deli, giving enthusiastic thanks for his salami and cheese sandwich. I opened the two bottles of San Miguel beer and unwrapped my own hot pastrami.

  “The lunch is in exchange for information on Molly Antonio’s postmortem,” I said. “How close were you able to pinpoint the time of death?”

  “Very. We know, from the husband, exactly when and what she had for dinner. From the stomach contents, she had to have been killed less than two hours after they ate at six o’clock.

  I thought of Gus Antonio, an arthritic little man who seemed continually bewildered by the world around him. “Can you be sure his information is reliable?”

  “Reasonably. He and his wife always ate at six on the dot. And the meal stood out in his mind because it was, for her, a particularly sketchy dinner.”

  “What was it?”

  “Hamburgers and fried potatoes. No vegetable, which was strange because she usually insisted on two, even though the husband hates the sight of them. She told him she’d forgotten to shop, but would lay in fresh supplies later.

  It fit with what Mr. Moe had told me. “She must have been preoccupied with something, if she’d forgotten to buy vegetables. So, after this sketchy meal – which, incidentally, sounds a lot better than most of mine – Gus went to Ellen T’s to play dominoes?”

  “Right. He claims he was in the back room all evening, until just before he found the body at eleven. We checked with the bartender, but unfortunately there’s a rear exit, by the restrooms. It’s possible Gus could have slipped out and come back, on the pretext of going to the john. We’re talking to the domino players today, but it’s difficult rounding them up.”

  “It’s hard for me to picture Gus doing anything so devious,” I said. “He has so much trouble coping with life as is.”

  “I know what you mean. I had difficulty getting a coherent statement from him this morning, even though he’d calmed down. Apparently he followed the same routine every night, though: first to his wife’s for dinner, then to the bar, then back to the wife’s and finally home.”

  “As near as I know, he never deviated from it. But I’m not home enough to be an authority on his comings and goings.”

  “Sharon, what about this peculiar living arrangement they had? Do you know anything about it?”

  I held my beer bottle up and squinted at the sun through its bubbles. “Only what I told you last night.”

  “But what was the reason she threw him out? You don’t discard a husband after all those years – he says they were married for forty – without some event to trigger it.”

  “All she would say was that she’s been driven crazy long enough.”

  “How, though?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, it’s damned strange.” He was silent a moment. “What about his job? He works for the Sunrise Blind Center.”

  “Yes. He leads one of the patients, a man named Sebastian, who restocks the grocery store racks with the brushes they make there.

  “How’d he get into that?”

  “Let’s see.” I considered. “The Center’s been in that location – on Twenty-fourth Street, in the buildings that used to be Saint Luke’s Catholic Church and Convent – for two or three years. Gus retired two years ago from his job as janitor at Edison School. Molly thought he needed something to keep him busy, and I think she asked if the Blind Center needed volunteers. They didn’t, but they had this paying position, and they offered it to Gus.”

  Greg grimaced. “He’s not a person I’d
entrust my life to while crossing the street.”

  “Me either. Sometimes I think Sebastian should lead him instead of vice versa. All in all, he’s a pretty poor murder suspect.”

  Greg began crumbling the edges of his sourdough roll. “He sure is, and I didn’t get anything useful from the other tenants in the building. They are the strangest damned lot.”

  “Maybe I’m not around enough to notice it.”

  “The next time you are, take a good look. There’s your manager, who evidently packs away beer on a round-the-clock schedule. There’s the guy on the second floor who has a huge statue of a nude woman in his living room – and nothing else except the Murphy bed. And there’s a woman on the third floor who looks exactly like a witch.

  “Mrs. Neverman.”

  “Ah, you know her? She greeted me with a gun – the registration of which I’ve already verified – and refused to let me into her apartment because I might be a rapist. She thought nothing, however, of coming out into a dark hallway to talk to me.

  “You? A rapist?”

  “Yeah, you never can tell when I’ll turn on you. Anyway, the Neverman woman claimed to be Antonio’s best friend, but she couldn’t tell me a single thing about her that shed any light on her death.”

  “She’s probably suspicious of the police. She certainly seems suspicious of everyone else, the way she creeps around there. I don’t believe she’s ever spoken to me.”

  “Huh.” Greg pushed his blond hair off his forehead. “Finally, there’s your corner grocer. Ye gods!”

  “Mr. Moe? What did you think of him?”

  “He’s got to be totally crackers. Kept insisting Antonio had died because of some evil prophecy from her fortune teller, but he couldn’t tell me who this prophetess of doom is or what she said.”

  “Oh, he gave you that too?” But Mr. Moe hadn’t seemed to take the prophecy story seriously, when I’d talked to him. Had he used it as a smokescreen? “What else did he say?”

  “That she was in twice yesterday, once around five and again at seven. It fits with the time of death and the theory that she surprised her killer.”

  I nodded. But something about the timing disturbed me. What? “I suppose you ran a check on Mr. Moe?”

  Greg took a swig of beer. “Makhlouf? Sure. Why?”

  I shrugged. “He’s one of these neighborhood characters that interests me.”

  “As well he should. His story is more interesting than most we hear.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Mr. Moe, as they call him, emigrated to New York from Saudi Arabia as a teenager. His father was reasonably well off, and he bought a grocery store in Brooklyn. After his death, Mr. Moe continued to operate it. He married, had one child.”

  “How’d he end up here?”

  “The child, a daughter, married and moved here first. Then Mr. Moe’s wife was killed by a mugger – for less than five dollars, all she had in her purse. Mr. Moe sold out and came here to be with his daughter.”

  “I never guessed that he had a family. He seems so solitary.”

  “He is, now. Tragedy followed him here. The daughter, her husband, and their baby died in that big apartment house fire on Church Street seven years ago. Mr. Moe lived with them, but he was out buying a paper when the blaze started. Several months later, he bought his current grocery store, probably to keep his mind off his loss.”

  I shook my head. “Symbolic, in a way.”

  “What is?”

  “The name of the store: the Albatross. A man with all that tragedy hanging around his neck might choose it for just that reason.”

  Greg’s dark-blond eyebrows pulled together. “I doubt he’s all that literary-minded.”

  “His record’s clean, though?”

  “Reasonably. He’s been hauled in on suspicion of discounting liquor in New York, and there was some indication he’d received stolen goods from time to time, but basically he’s clean.”

  “So that’s where your case stands.”

  “Yep. Unless you have something else to add.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Too bad.” Greg crumbled the remainder of his sourdough roll and tossed a piece to a pigeon that strutted nearby.

  I glanced up at the ominous cloud of birds that suddenly descended on us. Seeing my frightened face, Greg put the bread down and spread empty hands to them. “Sorry. I forgot you’re afraid of winged creatures.”

  “I know it’s silly, but it’s a common phobia. And phobias like that can kill you. I’ve read of people dying of shock from being exposed to perfectly innocent things they feared. So no more feeding the birds, okay?”

  “Okay.” He balled up the wrapper from his sandwich and stuffed it into the bag.

  I started clearing the other picnic things, my eyes on the blanket. “Greg,” I said, “about the murder weapon…”

  “Yes?”

  “What exactly was it?”

  “A piece of drapery cord. Unfortunately, it was a type of common manufacture.”

  “It must have been cut off a longer piece, right?”

  “Yes”. A puzzled note crept into his voice.

  “So, if you found the other piece, you could match them? By microscope?”

  “We could. Why?”

  “Just curious.”

  He watched me thoughtfully for a few seconds, then stood and folded the blanket. I retreated to the car as he tossed out a few remaining pieces of bread to the birds. We drove back to the Hall of Justice in silence.

  When I had pulled up to the curb, I asked, “What do you think of Mr. Moe’s fortune teller lead?”

  “It’s interesting. Why don’t you follow up on it?”

  “Okay. I’ve got some free time.”

  “Great.” He got out of the car and leaned back in the window. “After all,” he said with a grin, “I’d catch hell if I spent the taxpayers’ money on an all-expense-paid trip to Fantasyland.” He turned and loped off toward the Hall before I could reply.

  Dammit! I thought as I watched him take the steps two at a time with his agile gait. Was the man ever serious?

  5.

  By the time I had run some errands and found another parking space near my building, it was close to four o’clock. Anxious to check on Linnea, I hurried toward home, but was arrested by a familiar procession on the opposite sidewalk.

  A small, gray man, stooped with arthritis, led a taller, heavyset man by the arm. The big man wore an Army surplus parka to which were attached dozens of brushes – hair brushes, wisk brooms, feather dusters, bottle brushes – each held in place by a wire hook. He carried several brooms. The little man lugged a worn cloth suitcase with bulging sides.

  Gus and Sebastian, the brush man, going about business as usual less than twenty-four hours after Gus’s wife’s death. Or were they? What was the heavy-looking suitcase for?

  The pair crossed the street toward me, Gus raising a hand in greeting.

  “It’s Miss McCone,” he told Sebastian.

  “Gus,” I said, “I’m sorry about Molly.”

  He peered at me with red-rimmed eyes. The lines of his face and his jowls sagged dolefully. “Thanks, Miss McCone.”

  Sebastian shuffled forward and placed a hand on my arm.

  “How’re you?” I asked.

  His face, scarred and pitted by the explosion that had blinded him, twisted. “Not good at all. This is a terrible day.” To Gus, he added, “Why don’t you go get the key from Tim? Miss McCone can help me upstairs.”

  Gus nodded and labored up the front steps with his suitcase.

  I asked Sebastian, “How come you’ve got him working, with Molly dead less than a day?”

  Sebastian adjusted the brooms under his arm. “We’re not really working. I sent him in alone so I could tell you what’s happened.”

  “What more could happen, after last night?”

  “Plenty. And it’s a damned shame!” His face flushed an angry red, the scars white against it. “This morning Gus had to g
ive the cops a statement. They were pretty decent to him – even gave him a lift down there and back. But when they dropped him off at that sleazy joint he lives in, he found all his stuff stacked out on the porch.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. That bitch he rented from saw the story about Molly on the morning news. She said she was sorry for his trouble, but she couldn’t have him there anymore. Claimed Molly might’ve been offed by the Mafia and that they’d go for Gus next, so it wasn’t safe having him in the house.”