It took McMichael three calls to get Patricia Hansen's home phone number and tell her what had happened to her grandfather. She'd been sleeping and her voice was thick and dull but McMichael recognized it immediately. He could hear her husband, Garland, interrogatively grumbling in the background. She said thirty minutes and hung up.
Besides the painting missing from the hallway, Detective Barbara Givens had found for McMichael two more blank spots- with the lights illuminating nothing- in an upstairs bedroom. And another painting gone from the dining room. Another from one of the downstairs baths.
"Nothing else obvious," she said. "We could use someone who knows the house."
"The granddaughter's coming over."
"Good. The press is out in force. Local celebrity hour."
"Tell them no arrests. I let the nurse go home, Barbara. Leave her out of your statements if you can."
"They already know she made the call," said Givens. She was stout and broad-shouldered, with short blonde hair and quick blue eyes that often noticed what others missed. McMichael thought of her as optimistic and he trusted her completely. "Her car looked fine from the outside, Tom. Nothing interesting. Wouldn't mind lifting that trunk, though. And I listened to both the messages on the answering machine in the kitchen- a health insurance solicitation and a call from a man named Victor. No last name and no message."
Victor Braga, thought McMichael: Pete's son. A sixty-three year-old man with the mind of a ten-year-old. Living proof of the hatred between the McMichaels and the Bragas.
"Try the neighbors on each side, and across the street," he said.
"My next stop. What do you make of the nurse?"
McMichael had to think about that. There was a lot to see but not much to conclude. "Scared, angry. I don't think she did it."
"I'd feel that way, too. Whether I'd bashed him or not."
Back in the trophy room he watched the coroner's team zip Pete Braga into a body bag, one of them cradling the old man's head with a plastic sheet so the pieces wouldn't slide to the floor. McMichael felt bile in his throat and disgust in his heart. But he also felt a confirmation that pleased him in a way he couldn't deny, though he certainly wouldn't confess it to Father Shea.
Because Pete Braga had shot Franklin McMichael, his grandfather, dead in the summer of 1952.
Because Pete Braga said it was self-defense and the district attorney had not filed charges.
Because, in McMichael's book, murder was unforgivable and it always caught up with you in the end, which was part of why he had become a cop in the first place.
Patricia Hansen blew through the front door at twelve-forty in a red hooded raincoat, two steps ahead of Garland. She finished cursing an officer outside, shook out of the coat and hung it on a rack by the door while her husband battled the umbrellas.
McMichael had seen her eight times in the last twenty years, only because they lived in the same city.
"Goddamn Tommy, it's not good to see you but it is."
Flummoxed again, as he had been through the decades by Patricia Braga, McMichael defaulted to a nod. "I'm sorry about this."
"Where is he?"
"They took him to the morgue."
Patricia bit her lip, and for just a moment, standing there in a too-big reindeer sweater and jeans and rubber boots with fur around the top and her riot of dark hair, she looked like the girl he'd first stared at in the fifth grade, which was the moment he had first discovered Planet Female.
McMichael shook Garland 's hand and led husband and wife into Grandpa Braga's dining room. He put them at the other end of the table from where he and Sally Rainwater had sat, protecting the latent fingerprints she'd left on her chair and the polished tabletop.
He told the Hansens some of what Sally Rainwater had told him, but not all of it. He left out the man- probably a man- running across the sand into the gathering storm because he wanted the Hansens' unfettered take on the nurse's aid.
"What do you know about the caretaker?" McMichael asked.
"I never liked her," said Garland. "Pete ran an ad in the Union-Tribune, said he interviewed half a dozen."
Garland Hansen was a tall, slender man with a chiseled face and hard blue eyes. His Nordic white hair was cut short and brushed back to an appearance of velocity. He was forty-eight, ten years older than his wife and McMichael, an accountant and a former U.S. America's Cup first mate. He was now in middle management at a troubled surf-and-snow sports retail empire known as Shred!
"She was probably the prettiest one who applied," said Patricia.
Garland shrugged insincerely.
"Did he check her background?" asked McMichael.
"Of course," said Garland. "She had good enough recommendations. Supposedly putting herself through school, UCSD- biology, I think. Wants to be a surgeon. Pat and I figured if she was smart enough to do that, she could probably handle Pete."
"Handle him?"
Garland looked at Patricia, the silent handoff that married couples perfect.
"He'd fallen several times," she said. "His eyes were going. He kept driving without a license and you guys kept catching him. He hated to cook and clean. And he was lonely. Three children- one almost senseless, as you might remember, and two living out of state. Six grandchildren, including me, but they're hardly around except when they want money."
"What did he pay her?"
"I think it was five hundred a week," said Garland.
"Did she do it?" asked Patricia. Her voice wavered so she punched up the volume, and in this McMichael thought he heard the end of her toughness and the beginning of her grief.
"I don't know."
"Well, is she under arrest?" asked Garland.
"No."
"You didn't let her just walk away, did you?"
"She drove away."
Garland looked to his wife.
"Pretty goddamned funny," said Garland, standing and holding McMichael in his cool blue stare. "Someone murders Pete Braga, and a McMichael is supposed to solve it."
"Drop it," said Patricia.
"I'm afraid that's what he'll do," said Garland.
"Mr. and Mrs. Hansen," said McMichael. "Walk this house with me and help me figure out what's been stolen, besides some paintings off the walls."
An hour later McMichael's neatly hand-printed list read:
5 oil paintings by 19th cent. artists- 10 to 30K each (hall, bedroom 2nd floor, dining, 1st floor bath #2)
18th century Chinese vase- 5K (TV room)
4 a 'graphed books by Joseph Conrad- 5K per (all books from library, 2nd flr)
a'graphed b'ball gloves: Ruth, Gehrig, Hodges, Williams, Mays, Mantle, Koufax, Rose, Gwynn, etc.- 1K to 3K each (office, 2nd flr)
one mounted fish (small to medium)-$100???! (trophy room)
Items named and values estimated by Patricia & Garland, unsure of painter names, book titles, ballplayers, type of fish.
An interesting list, thought McMichael. And almost as interesting were the things not taken: $245 cash still in Pete Braga's wallet on the nightstand, a very good watch, a box full of jewelry in the top drawer of Anna Braga's dresser.
McMichael stood again in the master bedroom and watched the rain pour down on the outside deck, a large wooden platform enclosed for privacy by a waist-high railing but open to the sky. He remembered that Pete had liked to sleep out there, years ago. He remembered the fire pit. He remembered that the bay breeze cooled your skin after making love then the fire warmed you back up and the faint taste of salt and wood smoke on Patricia Braga's neck.
"I spent some good hours on that deck," she said. "Kid stuff."
Garland looked at it, then to his wife. "Looks cold."
"Grandpa slept out there practically every summer night. He used to, anyway."
Garland shook his head. Whether at Pete's sleeping habits or at Patricia was not clear to McMichael.
"What about a safe?" McMichael asked.
"Back to the library," said Patricia.
"You know the combination?"
"He gave it to me when Anna died."
The library was a classic gentleman's room, with floor-to-ceiling walnut bookshelves, ladders to access the volumes, paneled walnut walls, heavy furniture, hunter green carpet. There was a fireplace and a walk-in humidor behind glass doors.
McMichael stepped into the humidor, smelled the sharp sweet scent of tobacco and cedar, felt the air damp on his face. It was about the size of a closet, with shelves on two sides and a humidifier built into the other. He noted Pete Braga's cache: mostly Cuban maduros- Romeo & Julieta, Partagas, and Rey del Mundo. But some Dominicans thrown in, and two wooden boxes marked Libertados, which McMichael knew well because his sister owned the cigar bar and factory in San Diego 's Gaslamp Quarter where they were made. He wondered if the old man went there himself to buy them. And if he'd known his money was going to a McMichael. They were No. 7 pyramids, with dark brown wrappers.
The floor safe was hidden under a brown, brass-nail leather couch. Patricia knelt down and spun the dial.
"I don't know what's in here," she said. "I've never had a reason to open it."
McMichael knelt down beside her. It was a cylinder-type safe, ten inches across and a foot deep.
"Go ahead," he said.
Patricia reached in and lifted a handful of small boxes, which she placed on the carpet. Then another. Some black, some red, some tan, some white. She opened them and lined them up in front of McMichael.
"Grandma Anna's," said Patricia. "This isn't costume jewelry."
McMichael watched her hand as it gently moved across the jewels and gold and silver. He'd always loved the shade of Patricia's Portuguese fingers, especially where the rich dark of the top blended into the paler underside. They were thirty-eight-year-old hands now, leaner and stronger than they had been when McMichael knew her.
"She had a pair of diamond earrings that aren't here," she said. "Big two-carat things Grandpa got in South Africa. But there's got to be some other explanation. I mean- if somebody took them, he'd take all this, too. I mean, if they were even in here to start with. Right?"
"What else?" asked McMichael.
Patricia sighed, picked up a string of pearls, settled it back into the case.
"There's a species of hummingbird named the Anna's hummingbird, so Grandpa had one made for her," said Patricia. "It was life-sized, and there was a stand for it. Wings out, like it was flying. But the feathers were gemstones. It was beautiful, this big splash of red rubies on the throat and neck. Emeralds and diamonds. God knows what he paid for it. That would have been back in 'seventy-five, 'seventy-six. It's not here. It wasn't anywhere else that I saw. I guess you should add it to the list."
"I don't get it," said Garland. "How much do you need to arrest the nurse? Blood all over her? Valuables missing?"
McMichael suppressed an urge to flatten Garland.
"Pete have a will?" he asked.
"Sure. Talk to Hank Grothke."
"Junior or Senior?"
"I think Junior handles the will," said Patricia.
Garland sighed like he'd heard enough. "So, Detective. Someone ripped him off. Someone killed him. My money's on the nurse."
"Noted," said McMichael.
Patricia studied him with her steady dark eyes. "Grandpa was giving her things," she said.
"What things?"
"Paintings and jewelry, I think. I'm not sure, but he let us know- plenty of times- how great she was."
"Maybe he gave her the diamond earrings and the hummingbird," said McMichael.
"No," said Patricia. "He wouldn't give away those things. Those things were Anna."
"The nurse took him for a fucking ride, Detective," said Garland.
"Get out of here," said McMichael. "Sign the log on your way out."
He stood in the trophy room, behind the leather chairs in front of the fireplace, taking in details. Erik was dusting the handle of the sliding glass door for prints. There were yellow stick-ems posted everywhere, numbered to correspond to the lifts. And pink ones identifying the wineglasses, which would be emptied and bagged for the cyanoacrylate chamber back at the lab. Samples of the liquid would travel back to the lab, also, to be worked over by Flagler's forensics people.
Harley stooped over the club, which had been fished from the pool of blood and laid out on a sheet of opaque plastic.
"Superglue for this," he said. "I can feel the latents. Flagler will need the hair and brains and whatever else is stuck to it. Here's your firewood portrait."
He slipped the Polaroid from his pocket and handed it to the detective.
"Good," said McMichael, gazing at a potted plant hung near the far corner. Even from here it looked plastic. Its clay pot was supported by a cutesy wooden wall sconce. The top of the sconce flared into a heart shape with what looked like a homily printed on it in chipper, childlike handwriting. Gift from a child or grandchild, he thought- something that might not mean anything to anyone anymore.
"Yesss!" said Erik, standing back from the slider. "Whoppin' fingerprints on the handle here, and it looks like blood to me. This joker's toast."
McMichael stood in front of the trophy wall. He looked at the nail from which the club had possibly hung, noting the black fingerprint dust and the yellow tag. He counted twenty-two trophies, not including the missing fish, represented now by a blank space and a small hole. Who'd steal a mounted fish? Up close, he saw the red lip of a plastic screw seat, set in the drywall to keep the screw from pulling out. Something small hung here, he figured, from the size of the space and the single hole.
He looked over at the kitschy potted plant again, then went to one of the two huge aquariums. The tropical fish flitted and swirled through the blue, making their rounds amidst the clams and grass. There was a rock archway, bright yellow and red corals, even a decorative anchor. A tan and black wrasse with neon blue pinstriping glided past. Hermit crabs scurried, their shells impossibly beautiful, their antennae waving.
Lightning cracked through the sky outside and the fish flinched.
He loved his ocean, McMichael thought. And his baseball. And his Fords and his politics and his power. Clobbered dead by a thief for some paintings and baseball mitts and books? How much money is your common creep going to get for things like that? Two cents on the dollar? The guy would need Braga 's gate code to pull his car into the driveway, load the loot, get out before the nurse came back with the firewood. It didn't line up as that kind of robbery.
Which left the guy running from the trophy room. Or Sally Rainwater. Or maybe a team, with Sally conveniently out of the picture for the fatal forty minutes and the runner not a runner at all but a guy with a van. He went that way.
He looked over again at the potted plastic plant. It had become a brain thorn, which was McMichael's name for something that got into your mind on its own, bothered you, and you couldn't get it out. They were usually innocent and mildly annoying, like the names of actors whose shows you never watched, snippets of pop songs you've never really listened to, coaches whose sports you didn't follow. To imagine Joey Fatone humming the latest *NSYNC hit to Bobby Knight over and over again- that was a brain thorn.
So McMichael scratched his itch, walking over to see the plant up close. It was in fact a plastic creeping charlie. The pot was plastic, too; even the heart shape at the top was plastic, molded to look like painted wood. The childlike writing said:
A Happy Plant
Is a Smile
From
Heaven!
A grandchild's present, thought McMichael, touching the letters, which were raised and painted. Until his fingertip passed over the slick convex center of the O in From.
Odd. And no such thing as a brain thorn at a crime scene, he thought.
Gently, he pried at the sconce. It resisted, then clicked decisively, then swung out on two hinges. A video camera was fit into brackets on the back, allowing it to fit back into a rectangular hole in the wallboard. The lens was aligned with the cutout center of the letter O. The mike had a hole of its own, hidden behind the curve of the pot. A small motion detector was affixed beneath the camera and hard-wired into the "record" relay, its sensor partially concealed behind the leaves of the plastic plant. A 120 volt power cord twisted back into the hole and out of sight.
"Hey, guys."
The CSIs crowded in behind him. McMichael swung the hide-a-camera sconce open and shut then open again.
Harley couldn't believe he hadn't noticed it. Erik asked how you tell if a plant is truly happy.
McMichael's heart took a funny little dive when he pushed the eject button and found no cassette inside.
"So much for good luck, serendipity or the existence of God," said Erik.
McMichael concurred on two of the three, good Catholic that he was. He also wondered where the tapes were.
"This crime scene looks like that one two years ago," said Harley. "Applethorpe or something. You remember that, Tom, older guy up in Hillcrest?"
"It's still open. Team One."
"Unusual MO."
McMichael's phone vibrated.
"I'm down in Imperial Beach," said Hector. "Outside a pub called Ye Olde Plank. I really like these little binoculars. I can almost read the bartender's watch. It's about time for last call in there."
"Where's the nurse?"
"Third seat from the end of the bar, drinking at high speed. And yapping on her cell. She's made three calls in less than an hour, and downed five greyhounds. Least they look like greyhounds."
"She went straight there?"
"No, man. First home, then here."
"Did she take any loot out of her car?"
"Just her purse. But get this- I went around to her front porch, it's right there on the sand, you know? Had a look through the blinds to make sure she was okay. She was sitting on her couch. And over the couch is one of those paintings like Pete had. An old boat in a storm. Same kind of fancy gold frame. It looked like the last painting in the world a babe would hang in her apartment."
"There are five paintings missing from Pete's walls, according to Patricia," said McMichael. "She also said Pete was giving things to the nurse."
"Well, looks like Nurse Sally got at least one painting off the old man," said Hector.
"What did she do while she was home?"
"Cried."
"We'll knock on her door tomorrow morning," said McMichael. "Ask for a tour."
"She'll turn us down flat. But let's get her early, while she's still good and hungover."
"I've got IAD at eight."
Hector was quiet for a beat. "Good luck, man. I forgot about that."
"Wish I could."
Internal Affairs Department was no San Diego cop's idea of a good time. Especially one who liked his job and thought he could make a good captain someday. Especially one who'd worked with Jimmy Thigpen in Metro/Vice, back before Jimmy got caught in a very expensive hotel room with a prostitute, a Sheriff's Department deputy posing as a prostitute, a big bag of Oaxacan weed and $324,000 in cash.
"Maybe you could run Miss Sally through NCIC while I'm getting grilled about Jimmy."
"Glad to."