“What makes you say that?”
“Well, my first call was to Willard White”-another local private investigator firm-“and Gloria said I could have her whole staff for a few days if we could put ’em to work. Beats her having to lay them off, she said.”
“Really? How many people she talking about?”
“Up to five.”
Clearly, the number surprised and pleased Hunt. After Mickey had gone out again this morning for his interviews, Wyatt had spent some time with Tamara going over the notes he’d taken yesterday on the work he’d acquired. He’d estimated that load at close to two hundred hours. Five stand-ins would bridge the gap nicely. And from what it sounded like, they and perhaps even their bosses might all be available to fill in on standby if he kept hustling future work. “Why don’t you see if you can get all five of them down here later today, and maybe even Gloria and Will themselves, say two or two-thirty, and call me on my cell and let me know?”
Tamara snapped him a salute. “Will do, mon capitaine. Oh, and we also did get one more reasonably intelligent-sounding reward call, finally, from Hang-up Lady, real name Linda Colores. She was walking home from work-she’s one of the floor people at the Pottery Barn on Chestnut-and she heard a man and a woman having an argument on one of the streets down by the Palace. She thinks this was last Tuesday night, but she’s not sure exactly.”
“Did she get anything they actually said?”
“I didn’t ask her that. I didn’t want to step on your toes. But I got her vitals if you want to go out and talk to her, although she works all afternoon starting at one. Or I could ask her to come in here in the next hour or so and I could talk to her.”
Hunt, standing in front of her desk, shook his head in admiration. “Has anybody recently told you how fantastic you are?”
Tamara blushed and looked down briefly, then back up. “Thank you. It’s good to be back working. I didn’t know if I could do it anymore. Or do anything, really.”
“I wasn’t worried about that. In fact, it never crossed my mind.” He came forward and put his palms down on the desk across from her. “You can do anything you put your mind to, Tam. You know that, don’t you?”
She couldn’t meet his eyes. “I used to. But then I kind of got convinced I was fooling myself.”
He was standing looking down at her, but she couldn’t seem to commit herself to raising her eyes. “Hey.”
When he reached across, touched her chin, and gently lifted it, she looked up and gave him a half-broken smile. “You know,” she said.
He shook his head. “You weren’t fooling yourself, Tamara. You were amazing. You are still amazing, okay?” Waiting, still touching her chin, he held her gaze on him. “Okay?”
And at last something gave way in her and she nodded. “Okay.”
He pulled his hand away from her chin and straightened up. “That’s settled, then. Once and for all.”
She saluted again. “Yes, sir,” she said. “Once and for all.”
“You want to talk to this Linda Colores?”
“I could.”
“Okay,” Hunt said. “Go for it.”
Nearly the size of a football field, the Green Room at the San Francisco War Memorial was on the second floor of the stately marble building next to the Opera House on Van Ness Avenue. Floors and pillars in the vast room were of marble. The ceiling was at least twenty feet high and the featured colors were gas chamber green trimmed with gold. The room was earthquake rated for 1,300 people, though it easily could hold many more than that. For Como’s memorial, city employees were on hand at both sets of doors to turn mourners away and prevent the room from getting overfilled.
Hunt got there early enough to get in without any problem and he looked around to see an oversized photograph of a smiling Dominic Como hung from the wall behind the podium. Hunt had already walked by one of the long tables piled high with brochures of the Sunset Youth Project, the Battalion Special Corps, and pledge cards for the reward fund. The large portable screen up against the front wall indicated that the service was also going to include a video or a slide show.
Hunt was beginning to wonder what he had hoped to accomplish by coming here today at all. Not only was this going to be a difficult, if not impossible venue in which to hold even the most cursory of interviews, he did not yet know many of the players by sight. The only people he had actually met in connection with Dominic Como were his wife, Ellen, and Len Turner.
Now Ellen was surrounded by a mob of well-wishers and fellow mourners-perhaps some of them family members, but also a large host of mostly African-American men, women, and teenagers who Hunt assumed were Como’s associates, fellow workers, and many of the beneficiaries of his charitable work over four decades.
But then in the sea of faces, Hunt spied a familiar one on the outskirts of the group surrounding Ellen, and he gradually made his way up near the podium and touched the arm of the man who’d discovered the tire iron in the lagoon.
“Mr. Rand?” he said, extending his hand. “Wyatt Hunt.”
Rand recognized him right away, shook the proffered hand, and said half-jokingly, “You ain’t here to tell me I already got that reward, now, are you?”
Hunt grinned. “No, sir. I’m afraid not. But now that you mention it, we’ve learned that it was in fact the murder weapon. I don’t think that’s been in the news yet. They found some of what may be Mr. Como’s hair on it that didn’t get washed away. So if that information leads anywhere, I’d have to say that you’re still in the running, at least for part of it. Are you waiting to talk to Mrs. Como?”
“Not really. I never met the lady. I’m just payin’ my respects.” He raised a hand and mouthed a hello to someone he knew and then came back to Hunt. “Good to see this kind a turnout. ’Specially after all that in the paper today. I don’t know where they got all that, make Dominic look like some kind a… I don’t know what. You see that?”
“I did.”
“So what’d you think?”
“I think Jeff Elliot usually gets his facts right.”
“So you think Dominic was skimmin’ some a that?”
“I don’t know what to think, to tell you the truth. I didn’t read it so much that he was skimming something for himself as that he was only supposed to use certain money for certain things, and maybe he didn’t care so much about that.”
“You got that right. He just put it where they needed it. And all that about his car and people runnin’ for him, that’s just the way he done it, drivin’ folks around, taking people where they’s needed.” Rand waved a finger around at the crowd. “You just look around in this room and now tell me Dominic Como didn’t help a whole lot more people than most anybody else ever meets. You hear what I’m saying?”
“I do.”
“You do things first, you ask permission later, that’s how he was. An’ nothin’ wrong with that, you ask me.”
“You feel the same way about Len Turner?”
The name alone cast a shadow over Rand’s face.
“You got a problem with him?” Hunt asked.
Rand shrugged. “Don’t hate him. Different breed of cat, that’s all.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, I mean, like Dominic, he one of us, one of the people.”
“And Turner’s not?”
This brought a tolerant smile. “You go have a word with the man. You find out soon enough.”
“I already have, and I will again. And I believe you.” He turned to where Rand had glanced and finally saw Turner with a small knot of other mourners in somber conversation. “You know those other people over there with him too?”
“Some. That big, good-looking woman behind Ellen, talkin’ to him now, that Lorraine Hess, Dominic’s number two. Next to her is Al Carter.”
