model citizen. Worked for his father until the company was sold, then stayed with the conglomerate that bought it until four years ago, when the father died and he inherited big bucks. A few months later he went down to Paso Robles and bought into what was then called the Kane Winery. Daniel has never been married, races motorcycles in area competitions, lives in a million-dollar home on winery property. I’d say he probably gets a lot of women.”
An astute observation from someone who also got a lot of women. I remembered Jamie’s tentative question-“Does Derek ever ask about me?”-and the way Chris had smiled up at him at the party at Touchstone. And frowned.
“Something wrong?” he asked.
“Uh, no. That’s good stuff. Nothing else on Ziff, or Smith?”
“Ziff looks squeaky clean. Smith I haven’t started on.”
“Thanks, Derek. I’m heading out this afternoon for Paso Robles. You can reach me by my cell or at the Oaks Lodge.”
He nodded and left the office. I reached for the phone, to buzz Ted and ask him to reserve me a room, guaranteed for late arrival, but before I could, he buzzed me.
“Rae on line two.”
I picked up. “Hi, how’s it going?”
“I’m at the building on Fell Street. Property records show it’s owned by one Carl Dunn.”
“Why is that name familiar?”
“He’s Josie Smith’s first husband. He says that the year she died, he was letting her live in the second-floor flat while she tried to evict the tenants from a house she’d bought out in the Avenues.”
“He lives in the building?”
“Right. He occupies the same third-floor flat now that he did then. I’ve already confirmed that he rented the second-floor flat to Jennifer, but I think you’d better get over here so we can both interview him. I’ve got a feeling my skills along those lines are kind of rusty.”
“I’m on my way.”
“I had no idea Jennifer Aldin was Josie’s niece,” Carl Dunn said. “I knew her and Terry when they were children, but the last time I saw Jennifer was when she was nine or ten. Why didn’t she tell me who she was?”
I said, “Perhaps she didn’t remember you.”
We were seated in Dunn’s living room in the third-story flat of the Fell Street building, a bright comfortable space with large abstract paintings on the walls. Dunn was a big, bearded man with a mane of silver-gray hair, a real estate agent, Rae had told me.
Dunn frowned. “She might not’ve remembered my name or face, but I’m surprised she didn’t recognize the building. She stayed here several times with her mother.”
“How did Jennifer Aldin come to rent the flat from you?”
“My former tenants vacated it four months ago, and I listed it with my agency, plus posted a sign in the window. A few days later, Jennifer Aldin rang my bell, said she was driving by and saw the sign. I showed the flat to her, and she liked it. Said she would prefer a long-term lease and would be using the place as a studio only one or two days a week. The idea of a tenant who wouldn’t be around much appealed to me; the last pair were noisy and disruptive. And I like long-term leases; the woman on the first floor has been here since I bought the building in nineteen seventy-nine. So I accepted a deposit, and she gave me the names of three of her clients as references. They checked out, and we signed a year’s lease two days later.”
“You still have those names?”
“Somewhere in my files. Let me see.” He got up and went down the hallway.
I said to Rae, “Jennifer just happened to rent the same flat where Josie lived? I don’t think so.”
“Me either. And I now know why she lied to me about how long she’d had it; she didn’t want me to realize that it was connected with her obsession over her mother’s disappearance. Figure it out: her father dies five months ago, she begins to dwell on Laurel. Four months ago she rents a place that she associates with her.”
“Dunn said she came to the door after she saw his sign while driving past. Maybe she was on a sentimental tour.”
“Or had driven by more than once.”
Dunn came back into the room, a slip of scratch paper in his hand. “Here you go. Keep it, if you like.”
“Thanks.” I glanced at it, saw three unfamiliar names. One of the phone numbers was familiar, however: the Aldin residence. I handed the slip to Rae, my eyebrows raised.
She examined it and said, “Home, studio, cellular.”
Jennifer had supplied her own references.
“Mr. Dunn,” I said, “what can you tell us about Josie?”
He smiled-gently, for a man about to discuss his former wife. “When I met Josie, I’d just graduated from San Jose State and was moving up here to take a job at Wells Fargo Bank. We had a hot and heavy romance, and the next spring she dropped out of college to marry me. The marriage was a mistake from the beginning. Not her fault, not mine either. We were just too young, too different. We split up after five years, but remained friends. We’d have lunch every few months, talk on the phone. When she met Don Bernstein, we kind of lost touch, but after he dumped her-the bastard took off with another woman, left her with a heap of credit card debt-we started seeing each other again.”
Dunn paused, narrowing his eyes as if he was in pain. “Josie partied too much-one of the things that broke us up in the first place-but she was also a hard worker. She’d gotten her RN after we split, and when Bernstein took off, she started taking on private-duty nursing jobs, made very good money. Neither of us suspected she’d soon be in need of private-duty nursing herself.”
Another pause, a headshake. “Anyway, she made good on the debts, invested her money, bought a house out on Thirty-third Avenue. But the tenants were putting up a fuss about moving, and until the dispute went to court, I suggested she move into my empty flat. The dispute dragged on and on-suits, countersuits-and just after it was settled she was diagnosed with brain cancer.”
Dunn seemed to sink into thought, and Rae prompted, “So she stayed on here and you took care of her?”
“Of course. I wasn’t going to let her move into her house alone, not in her condition. And neither was Laurel Greenwood. She came often while Josie was sick, although she could only stay a night or two at the most; then, when the insurance that paid for the nursing had run out, she came and stayed to the end.”
“Did Josie die here or in the hospital?” I asked.
“Here. I wish we’d had her hospitalized.”
“Why, Mr. Dunn?”
“I don’t know if you’re familiar with brain cancer, but with the type Josie had and at the stage she was when she died, you can be lucid one moment, totally disoriented the next. While Laurel was napping one afternoon, Josie got out of the bed in the front room where we had her and wandered into the hallway. Fell down the stairs and died.”
It took a moment for my thought processes to kick in. Then I tried to remember the cause of death Derek had reported to me. Complications resulting from brain cancer.
I asked, “Were you here at the time?”
“No, I was out showing a property to a client. I returned just as the ambulance was taking Josie away.”
“And Laurel? You said she was napping?”
He nodded. “She was exhausted. Slept right through Josie’s fall. By the time Laurel found her, she was gone.” He compressed his lips, his eyes moist. “We never got to say good-bye, either of us. And then I never got to say good-bye to Laurel.”
On our way out of the building, I hesitated in front of the door to the first-floor flat. “Didn’t Dunn say the woman down here has been his tenant as long as he’s owned the building?”
“Right.”
“So she would have known Josie, maybe Laurel. And probably Jennifer.” I pressed the doorbell.
