The laugh again. “No, no. He was a confirmed heterosexual. He considered homosexuality an aberration and a sickness.”
“But you and he still got along?”
“Yes. Ours was a business relationship. One does not have to like one’s business associates to have a mutually satisfactory arrangement.”
“You mentioned that he had affairs. Any woman in particular?”
“I don’t know. He seldom discussed his female friends.”
“How about Mrs. Purcell? Any man in particular?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Eldon Summerhayes, maybe? You know who he is?”
“Of course. Was he one of Alicia’s conquests, you mean?”
“Yes. Was he?”
“I really couldn’t say. You might ask her.”
“Would she tell me?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“How well do you know Summerhayes?”
“Mostly by reputation. He despises me, I’ve been told.”
“Is that so? Why?”
“Because I am wealthy, and a bisexual, and a Filipino.”
“Have you ever had any business dealings with him?”
“None. I despise him as much as he despises me.”
“Would you say he’s honest or dishonest?”
“A little of both. Aren’t we all?”
“Not necessarily. How did he and Kenneth get along, do you know?”
“If you are asking if I consider Summerhayes capable of murder,” Ozimas said, “the answer is yes. My candid opinion is that the man is capable of anything.”
Birds of a feather, I thought.
I asked him a few more questions, mainly about Melanie Purcell. None of his answers told me anything new, or gave me any fresh insights. As for the boyfriend, Richie Dessault, Ozimas claimed to know nothing about him, to have never met him. He seemed willing to sit there talking to me all morning, if that was what I wanted. It was the last thing I wanted; he and his apartment and his pretty, jealous, pouting houseboy and his spaced-out platinum blonde made me want to go home and take another shower. I hadn’t even touched the coffee the kid had poured for me. I did not want to drink Ozimas’s coffee and I did not want to put my mouth on one of his cups.
I stood up finally, and thanked him for his time, and he said, “Not at all. It was my pleasure. If Kenneth was also murdered I certainly want to see the person responsible brought to justice.”
“You believe in justice, do you?”
“Naturally.”
“Sure you do,” I said, and I left him laughing and showed myself out.
Eberhardt was still at the office when I got there. But he had nothing to tell me-there hadn’t been any calls or visitors-and he left after five minutes for San Rafael, to finish up the insurance investigation for Barney Rivera.
I called the Hall of Justice. Ben Klein was in but not very helpful. He didn’t know anything about Alejandro Ozimas; Ozimas’s name had not come up during his investigation into the Leonard Purcell homicide. He said he would run the name through the city, state, and FBI computers, and let me know if he turned up anything. He hadn’t talked to Margaret Prine-no need to, he said, considering her stature in the community-and he had no idea why she should have refused to see me. Unless, he said, she just didn’t want to be bothered by a private detective.
My second call was to Joe DeFalco, a Chronicle reporter and another poker buddy. He was away from his desk, but I left a message and he called back within five minutes. He didn’t know much offhand about Margaret Prine-just that she was a wealthy society matron whose late husband had been ambassador to China before the Communist takeover, and later on, in the fifties and sixties, a presidential advisor on Chinese affairs. But he said he would run a computer printout of her file for me and have it ready by mid-afternoon, if I wanted to stop by and pick it up. I said I would, and when I hung up I found myself thinking about how newspapers keep a file on everybody who has ever made news of any kind, so it’ll be handy for the obit writers when the person trundles off to his reward. Gives you a morbid little shiver when you think about things like that-or it does me, anyhow. I wondered what my file consisted of. Well, maybe I would ask DeFalco to run a printout one of these days. And maybe I wouldn’t; I was not sure I wanted to see it.
There wasn’t much else to do at the office. I locked up and got the car out of the garage and went to interview Kenneth Purcell’s horny widow.
Chapter Eleven
Moss Beach is a little town on the coast halfway between Pacifica and Half Moon Bay, some twenty-five miles south of San Francisco. There isn’t much to it: a few dozen homes on both sides of Highway 1, some stores, a couple of restaurants, a somewhat dilapidated motel, and a year-round population of about four hundred. Some of the oceanfront and near-oceanfront homes are pretty nice, surrounded by wooded acreage and with easy access to the highway. The weather isn’t the best down along there-the fog likes to come in often and hang around for a while-or else Moss Beach would be prime Bay Area real estate. Even as it is, you needed to make a very comfortable living wage to afford property on the ocean side of the highway.
The weather wasn’t bad today: sunny, with those thin streaky cloud swirls that make the sky look as if it had been stirred by a giant stick. There was a sign where California Avenue intersected Highway 1 that told you to turn there to get to the James V. Fitzgerald Marine Reserve. I turned there and drove maybe a fifth of a mile, at which point California Avenue dead-ended at an unpaved road mysteriously called North Lake Street. If you turned right you ended up at the Marine Reserve-a long beach above which towered high sandstone bluffs and wooded parkland, and along which were rocky tidepools where you could take a close-up look at tiny mollusks, crustaceans, anemones, and other marine life. I went the other way on North Lake, south past some nice-looking houses on one side and the thickly wooded slopes of the park on the other.
Why Lake Street? I thought as I drove. There wasn’t any lake around here; just the ocean and the trees and the highway not far away. And why North Lake when there wasn’t any South Lake in the vicinity? Another of life’s little mysteries to annoy hell out of people like me, people with trivial minds, people who did too much thinking for their own good.
I came around a bend in the road, and on the right a narrow private drive, also unpaved, angled up through the growth of cypress and fir trees on the hillside. There was no name on the postbox at the drive’s entrance, but the number was the one I wanted; I swung past it, onto the narrow roadbed. After about a hundred yards, the drive leveled off into a gravel parking area big enough for maybe a dozen cars. The far end of it was bordered by a whitewashed stucco wall that curved away into the woods on both sides. The wall was about eight feet high, so that you couldn’t see over it, but the double-doored gate in the middle was made out of filigreed wrought iron and gave you a clear view of what lay within: a garden dominated by rosebushes and big ferns and a modernistic two- story house. The house, as far as I could tell, was all the same whitewashed stucco as the wall, with roofing that was part redwood shake and part Spanish tile. There was a squat, tower-like thing on the far side, and some odd angles here and there-as if its architect had begun taking hallucinogenic drugs halfway through the drafting of the plans.
I put the car up next to the gate and got out. Two other cars were parked there-a dust-streaked but new BMW and an elderly Fiat that needed body work and that may or may not have belonged to the maid/housekeeper. Set into the wall on one side was a bell-button and one of those speaker things. I pushed the button. Pretty soon a woman’s voice-the housekeeper’s, I thought-came through the speaker, asking me who I was and what I wanted. I told her. Nothing happened for maybe thirty seconds; then there was a buzzing and a click and the gate parted inward in the middle, an odd effect like something solid and substantial breaking open. Before I could take a step,
