storm until Good Tamara decides to come home again.
10
It didn’t take Tamara long to run the checks on the various individuals I’d encountered so far in the Abbott case. All but two had spotless records, the Pattersons among them unless you counted questionable ethics and business practices. The other two had only minor blemishes on their records, though one of the blemishes was of some potentially relevant interest.
Charley Doyle, the nephew, had been arrested twice, once on a D amp; D charge and once, five years ago, for causing a traffic accident while drunk that landed a forty-four-year-old Millbrae woman in the hospital with minor injuries. For the latter he’d paid a hefty fine and lost his driver’s license for a year; he was lucky the injured woman hadn’t sued him. Mrs. Alvarez’s brother, Leonard Crenshaw, was a parking scofflaw-twenty-two unpaid parking tickets dating back several years-and had been arrested once at age eighteen on a charge of malicious mischief. He and two other dummies had broken into an abandoned house in the Excelsior District and trashed it for no reason other than pure deviltry. A judge had ordered him and his cohorts to pay damages and sentenced them to two hundred hours each of community service.
Once a vandal, always a vandal? Pretty thin, but something to keep in mind just the same. And to ask Helen Alvarez and Crenshaw about the next time I saw them.
At a little after three I drove out to Dependable Glass Service, on Mission a half mile or so beyond the San Francisco-Daly City line, to see what I could find out from Charley Doyle. I’d been told he’d be back in the shop by three thirty, and he had been. But then he’d immediately signed out for the day; I missed him by five minutes. Glaziers evidently had the same sweetheart thirty-six-hour workweek as plumbers and other union tradespeople.
I told one of the office workers that I needed to talk to Doyle on an urgent matter regarding his aunt. That bought me his home address, which was also in Daly City. In my car I looked up the street and a route on one of the sheaf of maps I keep in the glove box. Newer cars nowadays are equipped with GPS navigators that make printed maps pretty much obsolete; Kerry has one in hers. But mine is fifteen years old, and even when I trade it in, as I figure I’ll need to do fairly soon, it’ll likely be for a used pre-GPS model. I’m a Luddite when it comes to modern technological advancements. A lighted computer screen on my dashboard and a disembodied mechanical voice giving me directions and chastising me if I didn’t follow them to the letter would only make me uncomfortable. I prefer to get my directions the old-fashioned way.
Doyle lived in a two-story, twelve-unit apartment building at least thirty years old, its stucco and wood facade showing signs of advanced age and not much TLC. What had once been a front lawn bisected by a cracked concrete path was now two rectangles of brown hay almost tall enough for harvesting. I went into an open foyer and found the mailbox marked: C. Doyle and pushed the the bell button. Nobody answered the ring.
I was about to give it up when a man came clumping down the inner stairs and out through the entrance door. Little guy about my age, who looked as if he’d had the same hard and neglected life as his place of residence: shaggy white hair, untrimmed white beard, yellowish eyes with tiny threads of blood swimming in the whites. He gave me an uninterested glance, would have brushed right on by if I hadn’t moved a little to block his way.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m looking for one of your neighbors, Charley Doyle.”
“So?”
“He doesn’t seem to be home.”
“So?”
Like talking to the former vice president. Same snappish, snotty tone. “Would you have any idea where he might be? Some place he goes after work?”
“Why?”
“I need to talk to him. It’s about his aunt.”
“So?”
“Look, I’m just trying-”
“Fat Leland’s,” he said.
“… How’s that again?”
“Bar.”
“Where?”
“Mission.”
“Where on Mission?”
He threw me a go fuck yourself look, stepped around me, and went away.
I said, “So long, Dick,” but if he heard me he didn’t care enough to respond.
Fat Leland’s was less than a mile from Dependable Glass Service. Typical neighborhood blue-collar tavern, moderately crowded and noisy when I walked in. I wedged in at the bar, caught the barman’s attention, ordered a draft Anchor Steam, and when he brought it asked if Charley Doyle was there.
He was. Sitting in a booth with a hefty, big-chested blonde who reminded me of a woman my former partner, Eberhardt, once mistakenly came close to marrying. Schooners of beer, two mostly full, two empty, sat wetly on the table between them. But all they had eyes for at the moment was each other. They were snuggled in close together, rubbing on each other and swapping beer-flavored saliva. They didn’t like it when I slid in across from them, and Doyle liked it even less when I told him who I was and why I was there.
“I don’t know nothing about it,” he said. He was a big guy with a beer belly, loose, wet lips, and dim little eyes. Two brain cells and one of them is usually passed out drunk, Helen Alvarez had said. Good description. “What you want to bother me for?”
“I thought you might have some idea of who’s behind the vandalism.”
“Not me. Old lady Alvarez thinks it’s them real estate people that tried to steal my aunt’s house. Why don’t you go talk to them?”
“I already did. They deny any involvement.”
“Lying bastards,” he said.
“Maybe. You been out to see your aunt lately?”
“Not since I fixed her busted window. Why?”
“Well, you’re her only relative. She could use some moral support.”
“Some what?”
“Comfort. A friendly face.”
“Yeah, well, she’s got Alvarez and her brother to take care of her. She don’t need me hanging around.” He helped himself to a long pull from his schooner, smacked his lips. The blonde nuzzled his shoulder and gave him a vacuously adoring look. “Besides, she gives me the creeps.”
“Your aunt does? Why?”
“She’s about half-nuts. What’s that disease old people get? Al something?”
“Alzheimer’s. But she’s not afflicted with that.”
“Afflicted,” Doyle said, as if it were a dirty word he didn’t quite understand.
“She’s not senile, either. Pretty much in possession of all her faculties, I’d say.”
“All her what?”
I sighed. “Brains.”
“That’s what you think. How many times you talked to her?”
“Once.”
“Once. Hah. Spend time over there, you’ll see what I mean. Babbles on about crazy stuff. Ghosts, for Chrissake. Her dead husband’s friggin’ ghost.”
“Tell me, Mr. Doyle, do you stand to inherit her estate?”
“Huh?”
“Do you get her house and property when she dies?”
His dim little eyes showed faint glimmers of light. “Yeah, that’s right. So what? You think it’s me doing all
