The Emerald Cat Killer (3 page)

He printed out what he needed, checked the beneficiary's phone number, and placed a call to Mrs. Simmons. A neutral voice answered, “Rockridge Savings and Loan. If you know your party's extension enter it now. Otherwise, please speak the name of your party and stay on the line for assistance. This call may be recorded or monitored for quality control.”

“Mrs. Simmons, please.”

She had a pleasant enough voice. She didn't sound particularly grief-stricken and obviously she'd returned to work. But then it had been a year since Gordon Simmons's demise. Lindsey explained that he was investigating Simmons's death in connection with the lawsuit. Mrs. Simmons said that she got off work at four o'clock and Lindsey arranged to come to her home.

Before he took his leave of the branch office, he returned Richelieu's earlier call.

“Okay, got it, Mr. Richelieu.” Oh, how he longed to call him Ducky to his face—or to him over the telephone. Maybe someday. Maybe not. “Okay, you know that our client is looking at a nasty copyright infringement suit. We already paid a death claim related to this case, and now we're on the other side of the fence.”

“For heaven's sake, Lindsey, tell me something I don't know.”

“Who's our lawyer? Shouldn't that information be in the file?”

“Isn't it there? You'll be happy about that one, at least. You remember your old buddy Eric Coffman?”

“Of course I do.”

“Well he didn't put in his retirement papers and go home to sit on his hindquarters and collect pay for no work. He's still earning his keep. And he's our sheriff on this one if we can't head the rustlers off at the pass.”

“He doesn't work for I.S., does he?”

“He's on retainer.”

“Okay, at least that's good. I think I'll round up a posse and get a feel for what's going on before I call Eric. But if you feel like it, Mr. Richelieu, you send him a smoke signal to let him know I'm on the trail.”

And where the hell did all the cowboy talk come from?

*   *   *

The Simmons home was a comfortable-looking craftsman bungalow on Eton Avenue, a short side street not far from Rockridge Savings and Loan. A ten-year-old gray Chevy stood in the driveway. A shoulder-high brick pillar set off concrete steps leading to a heavy wood and cut-glass door. The house looked like Depression-era construction, well kept, with a tidy front lawn and a small, carefully tended flower bed.

Lindsey had parked at the curb. He rang the doorbell and was greeted by a yipping dog.

Mrs. Simmons—her looks matched the voice on the telephone to perfection—opened the door a crack and said, “Mr. Lindsey?”

Lindsey passed a business card through the opening. It read,
INTERNATIONAL SURETY / SPECIAL PROJECTS UNIT—DETACHED SERVICE
. There was a cartoon image of a potato, the visual pun for SPUDS, and Lindsey's name.

“I hope you don't mind Millicent.” The woman pushed the dog aside and admitted Lindsey. Millicent sniffed his trousers, decided he was not a burglar, and backed away.

Moments later, seated in the living room, Lindsey said, “Mrs. Simmons, I understand that you are suing Gordian House.”

“Angela, please. Angela Simmons. Marston and Morse and I. We haven't filed suit yet. We are contemplating it.”

Lindsey found himself liking her. She was casually but neatly dressed, her medium brown hair done in a soft style, her manner relaxed. This was a woman who knew who she was, who lived comfortably, if modestly; who accepted herself on her own terms and the world on its.

He said, “Yes.”

“Gordon's publishers.”

“I'm sorry, I don't recognize his byline: ‘… by Gordon Simmons.' I'm afraid I don't read as much as I ought to.”

“That's all right, he didn't use his real name. I've saved copies of all his books. He was careless about them but I was proud of him. I saved all his editions.”

She crossed the room to a bookcase and returned carrying half a dozen paperbacks. She spread them on the coffee table. The covers featured colorful paintings and splashy lettering. The titles followed a pattern:
The Blue Gazelle, The Pink Elephant, The Yellow Thrush, The White Bat, The Purple Cow.

Lindsey couldn't keep from starting to recite, “I've never seen a purple cow…”

Angela put up her hand like a traffic cop stopping the flow of cars. “We laughed about that a lot. Nobody younger than forty seemed to get the joke.”

Lindsey scanned the book covers. The artwork wasn't really bad. His own father had been a cartoonist and Lindsey had an eye for skillful rendering. The subject matter on these was fairly lurid, standard tough-guy-and-sexy-dame images. The byline was Wallace Thompson. Lindsey looked a question at Angela Simmons.

“Gordon had a civil service job. There were government regulations about publishing outside work. I don't know what they were afraid of. Maybe somebody would give away the secret codes of the social security system. Or maybe some little bureaucrat would write dirty books on the side and a politician would find out about it and kick up a fuss, accuse Uncle Sam of employing a pornographer. But it wasn't a bad thing. Gordon liked to keep his day job and his writing separate anyway. No one at the office knew about Wallace Thompson.”

Lindsey reached inside his jacket for a notebook and a silver International Surety pen. He hadn't gotten a gold watch but at least he was given a silver pen and pencil when he said good-bye. “You don't mind if I take a few notes?”

She didn't mind. In fact she offered to get them coffee, and Lindsey accepted with gratitude.

“Mr. Lindsey—”

“Hobart.”

“I don't understand why International Surety is involved. There's no problem with Gordon's life insurance, is there? You can't take the money back. It's all gone. I used it to pay off the mortgage on this house.”

Lindsey shook his head. “Nothing like that. You see, International Surety isn't just a life insurance company. We sell many kinds of insurance. Including business and indemnity policies.”

She waited for him to continue.

“We have an indemnity policy with Gordian House. If your suit against them—yours and Marston and Morse—is successful, we will have to reimburse Gordian House for their damages. The damages they will have paid. Do you see?”

“Then you're—” Angela Simmons lowered her coffee cup onto its saucer with a clatter. “Are you here … you're on their side? On Gordian's side? Mr. Lindsey, I probably shouldn't be talking to you. At least not without my lawyer present. I think maybe you'd better leave. Right now.”

Lindsey slid his pen back into his pocket and closed his notebook. “I'm not on anybody's side, Mrs. Simmons.” So much for Angela and Hobart. “I'm just trying to understand the case.”

Mrs. Simmons stood, called Millicent, clicked a leash onto her collar, and walked to the door with Lindsey.

“Millicent needs to go out.”

At the bottom of the steps she stopped to let the dog sniff a bush. Apparently someone else had been there and left a message. Angela Simmons laid her free hand on top of the brick pillar.

“It was right there,” she said.

Lindsey said, “What do you mean?”

“Where Gordon hit his head.”

Lindsey waited.

“It was raining. We were in bed. Millicent started howling and woke us up.”

Apparently she had changed her mind about talking to Lindsey. A minute ago she'd regarded him as the enemy. Now she was telling him the story of her husband's death.

“Gordon always locked the car. Not just at night. Even during the day, any time he wasn't driving, he always locked the car.”

She let out a deep breath.

“But he'd been working late at the library. He'd just finished a book. He hadn't even turned it in to his editor at Marston and Morse. He was starting research on the next one, that was why he had the laptop at the library. He came home with an armload of books and it was dark out and it was raining hard and he couldn't handle everything at once. He brought the books into the house. He was so tired. He'd worked all day shuffling papers for the government and spent hours doing research at the library. He stayed until they closed. Once he was in the house he forgot all about his laptop. I made him a hot bowl of soup and a slice of toast. He was too tired to eat anything else. And then we went to bed.”

Millicent was tugging at her leash but Angela Simmons was reliving that night a year in the past.

“When Millicent heard something—she must have heard something—she woke us and I said, ‘Gordon, it's a burglar.' He put on his slippers and went downstairs but there was nobody there. I kept Millicent with me, I was afraid, I was holding her in bed. I heard the front door, Gordon went outside. Then I heard his voice but I couldn't make out what he said. Then I heard the car door open and Gordon's voice again and then the car door slammed shut. I put Millicent's leash on her and we ran downstairs and ran outside. Gordon was lying on the ground.”

She gestured to the sharply pointed corner of the brick pillar. “That was where it happened. I ran back in the house and called nine-one-one and the police came and an ambulance came. Gordon's nose was broken and it was bleeding and there was blood on the bricks here, too. I thought it was just his face, I thought he would recover, but they said that he'd smashed the back of his head on the corner of the bricks. He had bone splinters in his brain.”

She stopped. She was out of breath. Millicent had gotten tired of waiting for her walk and done her business on the lawn.

Lindsey said, “I'm sorry, Mrs. Simmons.” He couldn't think of anything else to say.

“They took him to the hospital, they tried to save him, but it was no use. He had splinters in his brain.”

She blinked as if she'd fallen into the past for a moment, and then bounced back to the present.

“It must have been some homeless person. Probably some homeless man, maybe a woman, you can never tell nowadays.” Angela Simmons reached into her pocket and pulled out a plastic bag and a couple of paper towels. She cleaned up after Millicent, walked to a gray trash container, and dropped the bag into it. She came back and resumed her account. She'd caught her breath.

“It must have been some homeless person,” she repeated. “It was raining and he must have been trying every car door he came to, looking for a place to sleep. At least that's what the police thought. That's what they told me. Gordon always locked the car but it was cold and raining, and he was so tired, he forgot. Just that once, he forgot. The homeless man saw Gordon's laptop and he thought he could steal it and maybe sell it the next day. But Millicent heard him and Gordon went to investigate.”

Lindsey stood, listening. He could make his notes later. When an interviewee gets on a roll you just listened and remembered.

“The police thought that Gordon pulled open the car door to send the man away, and he smacked him the face with the laptop. It must have been a man; a woman wouldn't do that, do you think? I think it must have been a man. He smashed him in the face with the laptop and knocked him back against the pillar. That's why his nose was broken and why he had bone splinters in his brain. That's why he's dead.”

“The killer was never found?” Lindsey asked. “I would think … well, weren't there fingerprints in the car that could lead to the killer?”

Angela Simmons shook her head.
No.

“But if the person was in the car … did he wipe off his fingerprints?”

“The police don't think so. They checked out the car. They found plenty of prints. Gordon's, mine, some friends that we gave a ride to the airport a week or so before. Everything was normal. But nothing that helped very much. I mean … nothing that helped at all, in fact. Nothing that helped at all.”

Lindsey started to take his leave but she put her fingers on his wrist and detained him for another minute.

“They found an organ donor card in Gordon's wallet. I never knew about that. He wanted to donate his organs, and they took them at the hospital. Harvested them. That's what they call it, you know. They harvested his organs, and his heart is beating in another person's chest right this very minute. And somebody has his liver. And his spleen, and his pancreas. Even his eyeballs. They weren't damaged when he was hit. They use everything today, nothing goes to waste.”

Lindsey said, “Like the Shmoo.”

Angela Simmons tilted her head and gave him a curious look. “Like the what?”

Lindsey said, “Nothing. Nobody remembers the Shmoo.” He managed a smile. “A comic-strip creature that was so eager to be useful, it would just keel over when you looked at it. The bristles made toothbrushes, the eyes made buttons. The meat tasted like chicken.”

THREE

The Berkeley Police Department had gotten its new headquarters building at last. After the creaky old structure on McKinley Avenue, the nearby replacement looked modern and efficient from the outside. From the inside it resembled a medieval dungeon. Well, progress was progress.

Lindsey had phoned ahead and he was met by a uniformed sergeant who could have passed for a shaving-lotion model. If there were such things anymore. Blond, blue-eyed, clean-shaven, and wearing a uniform that must have been custom-fitted. He looked like a private eye from a Richard Prather paperback, suddenly drafted into the official police force.

“Olaf Strombeck,” the shaving-lotion model introduced himself. They shook hands, exchanged business cards, and proceeded to Strombeck's office, Lindsey now wearing a visitor's badge on his jacket pocket. You would have thought they were a couple of Japanese businessmen meeting to cut a billion-dollar deal for some futuristic electronic gadget, not an insurance man and a detective sitting down to discuss a murder.

Strombeck had pulled a file and laid it on his desk, but before opening it he said, “Mr. Lindsey, I don't understand why you're here, sir. This is a police matter. This is an open case. I'm not sure just how much information I can give you.”