“You’re not old, Mr. Parr.”
“Jim, please.”
“Jim, then. Who is not old in spite of a life of risk.” Then Alicia whirled back on her brother. “See?” And finally, to the rest of them, “Ian doesn’t want me sleeping out in my car either. Too dangerous.”
“It is dangerous,” Ian said. “There’s all kinds of nuts out there.”
Mickey turned away from the stove. “You sleep out in your car?” Alicia nodded. “Sometimes. Last night I did. I wanted the early morning waves.”
“Actually in it?” Mickey asked.
And Tamara clarified, adding, “Mickey’s been spending about half his nights sleeping outside.”
“Mostly on the ground, though,” he said. “I can’t stretch out in my car.”
“She can,” Ian explained. “She’s got a Honda Element. She can run laps in the damn thing if she takes the seats and her surfboard out.”
“Why do you do it, Mick?” Alicia asked. “Sleep out, I mean.”
He stirred the polenta for a moment. “I don’t know exactly,” he said. “It’s not structured. It’s peaceful. You feel free. You wake up with the sun.” He shrugged. “I just like it. How about you?”
She sighed. “Well, here’s the thing. I get two days off a week, Monday and Tuesday. Otherwise, I’ve got to be in a dress and nylons and high heels and makeup. And sometimes, a lot of the time, I guess I feel like I’m trapped. So I drive off and sleep where I stop, and I don’t feel so… I don’t know, so regimented. Like I can still make some of my own decisions, and I’m not stuck in a life I don’t want to live. I mean,” she added, “look at all of us-maybe not you, Jim-but the rest of us. We’re just all marking time, trying to get into something that’s going to feel like our real lives, you know. You guys going to chef classes, and, Tamara, you starting your day job again.
“Maybe I sleep out to remind myself that my real self is still there, I’ve still got time, I’ve got game, I’m going to be doing something that’s really me someday, that matters, and as long as I’m still that person who can just jump up and go sleep out somewhere, then that’s someone I recognize. I’m still here.” As though surprised by how much she’d revealed about herself, she ducked her head a bit into her shoulders and looked around at her audience. “Sorry,” she said. “TMI.” Too much information. “It’s my inner nerd. I can’t shut her up.”
“That’s all right.” Tamara grabbed a bite of arugula from the bowl in front of her. “We’re a tolerant household. The nerd’s welcome too.”
Mickey was looking in at the goat and now pulled it out of the oven, setting it on the top of the stove. He covered it with aluminum foil, then turned back to the table. “Ten minutes to let the meat rest while the polenta cooks, then we eat. And you said it better than I could, Alicia. That was pretty much exactly it.” In spite of her no- nonsense style of dress tonight-she wore old jeans, a plaid flannel shirt, and hiking boots-Mickey had been fighting the temptation to stare at her since she’d come in. But now he braved a quick surreptitious look and noticed a faraway glaze and glassiness in her eyes. “Alicia? Are you okay?”
Biting her lip, she nodded. “Just, you know, dealing with the Dominic thing again. That whole doing- something-that-matters is looking a little more distant right now, that’s all. But I’m okay. Really.”
Parr tipped up his glass, then poured himself some more. “What about Dominic? Did you know him too?”
“Did she know him?” Ian asked.
And for the next twenty minutes, until the dinner was halfway gone-everyone loving the goat-they covered the common ground between Jim and Alicia as Como’s drivers, some of the life and politics up at Sunset, how things were the same, and how they had changed. “Yeah, but even with all the changes,” Parr was saying, “everything I hear is that what Dominic did was essentially the same. He drives around, talks to people, helps wherever he can. Serves food. Drives nails. He was just a hands-on guy. I’m never going to believe Dominic was stealing money. And irregularities? A business this big, there’s always going to be paperwork problems. But if somebody was taking money, it wasn’t Dominic.”
“But do you think that’s what this is about?” Mickey asked. “Somebody taking money and Dominic found out?”
“This is what’s been getting to me,” Alicia said. “I can’t imagine what it’s about. Given who Dominic was, the man he was, it just defies belief.”
“Well.”
All eyes went to Parr.
“But I promised my good-cooking grandson I wouldn’t go out there and ask around.”
Ian was sitting in the visitor’s chair at the end of the table. “And what would you ask about?”
Parr put his fork down. “Just what we’ve all been talking about here. Somebody taking money. Maybe somebody who just wanted to take over. I mean, look at it. Dominic’s been doing it his way forever. So long as he’s there it’s going to keep getting done the same way. But now there’s more money and more organization all around, am I right? More decisions that he’s got to take part in, but he’s not really interested. He wants to be on the street ’cause that’s who he is.”
Mickey, though, was shaking his head. “It’s a good theory, Jim, but let’s not forget that Dominic wasn’t exactly Saint Francis of Assisi living with a vow of poverty. Just his legit salary was six hundred and fifty grand a year in this job.” He held up a hand at the expected opposition around the table. “Not that he didn’t earn it, but he was also the rainmaker who brought in most of that money.”
“And is that a bad thing?” Alicia asked.
“Not at all. But let’s remember that whoever took him out killed the goose who kept laying the golden egg, year after year. Alicia, Jim here is talking about serving food and driving nails, but how often did Dominic do fund- raisers too? Almost every day, right? At least four days a week?”
“At least,” she had to admit.
Mickey shrugged. “I’m just saying I haven’t seen any sign he was slowing down in the job. In fact, the more we talk about this, the more I’m inclined to start with what Al Carter said-Dominic was meeting somebody he knew over how he could help him. That sounds like Dominic, doesn’t it? Hands-on, one-on-one. Even if the appointment was just an excuse to get Dominic alone, at least he believed it.”
“Maybe you should talk to Al Carter again, Mickey,” Alicia said.
And Mickey nodded. “The thought has crossed my mind.”
Hunt had sat in his car and pondered for most of fifteen minutes, then had placed a call to Gina Roake. She advised him to leave the scene and to make an anonymous call to the Police Department reporting what he’d seen. Maybe even disguising his voice. He wanted, she had told him, nothing to do with discovering the body of Nancy Neshek, if indeed it was she, which he did not doubt.
But they both knew he could not do that without running the risk of losing his license. More than that, he just didn’t see himself operating like that. So about twenty minutes ago, he had called Juhle and then gone back to sit in his car at the curb.
The first police vehicle to appear was a black-and-white SFPD squad car. This might turn out to be a dicey moment, Hunt realized, since his precise role here was nebulous at best. Especially when the crime was murder and the scene was a locked-up, darkened mansion in one of the city’s most expensive neighborhoods.
Nevertheless, there was nothing to do but brazen it out, so he flashed his lights briefly at the squad car as it pulled up, and emerged from his Cooper into the lights of the squad car with his identification held out in front of him. “I’m a private investigator named Wyatt Hunt,” he announced. “I’m the one who called Inspector Juhle.”
One of the officers-the name badge over his pocket read “Sorenson”-jerked a thumb in the direction of the house. “There’s a body in there?”
“Yeah.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw it from the window.” He didn’t want to go into too much detail about which window and what he’d been doing out here in the first place. Maybe they wouldn’t ask.
“You’re sure?”
“Reasonably, yeah.”
“Okay.” The cop opened the back door of his squad car. “Please have a seat and we’ll be right back.”
This sounded like a request, but Hunt knew that squad car doors didn’t open from the inside when you were in the backseat and that a cage separated him from access to the cop’s stuff in the front. He was being detained in
