Endgame--A Nameless Detective Novel Read online

  “Did you ever meet him?”

  “No. As far as I know he never came to San Francisco.”

  Runyon asked the deputy, “Did Hansen have any idea why Mr. Dennison wanted use of the cabin?”

  “No.”

  “Had Mr. Dennison ever asked to use it before?”

  “He didn’t say. And I saw no reason to ask him.”

  Patricia Dennison shifted impatiently on her chair. “May I see the cabin or not?”

  “If you insist,” Rittenhouse said. “Just to look at it from the outside?”

  “No. The inside, too.”

  “Then I’ll have to go with you.”

  “Can’t you just give us the key and tell us how to get there?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

  “All right, then. Can we go now?”

  Rittenhouse got ponderously to his feet. “I’ll get the key,” he said, but he didn’t look happy about it.

  4

  On my way out of Shelter Hills I called Tamara to tell her I was going ahead with the investigation and give her the details of my interview with James Cahill. It’s against the law in California to talk on a cell phone while you’re operating a motor vehicle, as it damn well should be, unless you use one of those hands-free Bluetooth devices. Tamara and Kerry had talked me into getting one, and I had to admit it made the job of communicating when on the road easier. But I still felt self-conscious wearing headphones and speaking into a mouthpiece while alone in the car. I could just imagine somebody in a passing car looking over at me and thinking I was one of those strange types who would benefit from psychiatric treatment.

  “I already know what I’m going to label the file,” she said. “‘The Case of the Absent Agoraphobe.’ Like one of those old Perry Mason TV shows.”

  “Since when do you watch old Perry Mason episodes?”

  “Long time now. Whenever I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep. Seems like there’s always one on some channel or another. Hey, I’m getting to like black-and-white.”

  “Too bad more people your age don’t feel the same.”

  “Goes for other things, too,” she said pointedly. “You want me to run a check on the new client and his wife both?”

  “Yes. I’m fairly sure Cahill was straight with me, but I’m not taking anything for granted anymore. See what you can find on the accident four years ago, and the present whereabouts of the daughter of the man who was killed, Sofia Hernandez, last known address Pleasant Hill. And the address of the woman who accused Alice Cahill of plagiarism, Grace Dellbrook.”

  “Dellbrook spelled how?”

  “Just like it sounds. D-e-l-l-b-r-o-o-k.”

  “Got it.”

  “Kendra Nesbitt, Dr. Paul Nesbitt, and Fran Woodward, too. The field of known suspects seems pretty narrow, so we’ll need to cover them all.”

  “Known being the operative word. Doesn’t have to be one of them who made the woman disappear.”

  “No, it doesn’t. But if it’s not, and no other prospects turn up, James Cahill may well wind up on the wrong end of a murder charge.”

  “You think Mrs. Cahill is dead, then?”

  “I hope not. But it’s been a week. She wasn’t kidnapped for ransom or there’d have been communication by this time. It’s barely possible she was snatched by a psycho bent on torture and is being held captive somewhere, but I don’t buy it.” Didn’t want to buy it, after the monstrous thing that had happened to Kerry in Green Valley not so long ago.

  “There are other kinds of psychos than the sex kind,” Tamara said. “The Dellbrook woman could be one of them.”

  “Yes, she could,” I said. “Start the checks with her. Meanwhile I’ll see what I can find out from Alice Cahill’s sister.”

  * * *

  The Nesbitts lived in Lafayette, Walnut Creek’s affluent neighbor to the west. The GPS I’d had installed in the car a while back got me to their address without any difficulty. One more piece of modern technology I’d resisted until it became a necessity, like iPhones and the Bluetooth, and that I had to admit made life a little easier—when they worked as they were supposed to. Adapt or stagnate, that had been Kerry’s advice. Well, she was right, of course. But I couldn’t help being nostalgic for the old ways I’d learned and understood and functioned pretty well with and by, and I still clung stubbornly to the ones that had yet to disappear or be subsumed.

  The neighborhood, as you’d expect an established physician and his wife to reside in, was a very good one. Large homes on large lots, some with lawns that were still green in spite of the drought restrictions on water usage. Well-to-do scofflaws are much worse than poor ones, in my opinion. Their “I can afford to pay for it, so why should I bother to conserve” attitude irritates the hell out of me. Call it contempt for the contemptuous.

  Dr. and Mrs. Nesbitt were not among the offenders, at least not where the maintenance of green lawns was concerned. Their landscaping was a fairly low-maintenance array of trees large and small, rhododendrons, rosebushes, and other flowering shrubs and plants. Not that that absolved them from being water wasters; all the plantings had the kind of healthy look homeowners get when they keep their sprinkler system turned on six or seven days a week. The yard was being tended to by two people when the disembodied GPS voice told me I’d arrived at my destination—a middle-aged Hispanic who was probably the owner of the vehicle labeled Pedro’s Gardening Service parked in front, and a younger woman wearing old clothes and a straw hat.

  A cream-colored four-door Lexus, new or almost new, was parked in the driveway. I walked up past it, turned into the yard on a flagstone path. The woman had been industriously using a pair of clippers on one of the rosebushes; she stopped when she saw me, stood peering for a few seconds, then came over to greet me.

  She had the kind of big-boned figure that had probably once been voluptuous—the loose gardening shirt she wore didn’t hide the fact that she was well endowed above the waist—but was now a little on the heavy side. The broad, floppy brim of the hat shadowed her face, but I could see enough of it to tell that she was in her mid- to late thirties and that the extra weight did not detract from her appeal. Even dressed in gardening clothes, she wore a dark red shade of lipstick.

  “Yes?”

  “Mrs. Nesbitt? Kendra Nesbitt?”

  “That’s right. Who are you?”

  I told her and then showed her. Her expression had been neutral until she had a good look at the license photostat; then it tightened, her rouged lips compressing.

  “A private detective,” she said. Her tone had changed, too, developed a coating of frost. “I suppose he hired you. My brother-in-law.”

  “James Cahill, yes.”

  “To find out what happened to my sister.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, it won’t do him any good. Won’t convince anyone he’s not responsible for Alice going missing, least of all the police.”

  “Responsible meaning what, exactly?”

  “What do you think it means? He killed her.”

  “Why would he do that, Mrs. Nesbitt?”

  Her mouth developed a sour pucker that pulled the rest of her face out of shape, turned attractive into unattractive. “Because he hated her, that’s why. For being ill, confined to the house. For turning his life upside down and making it what he called a living hell.”

  “If he felt that way, then why not just divorce her?”

  “Because of the insurance, that’s why.”

  “Insurance?”

  “Their joint life insurance policy with Statewide Mutual. One hundred thousand dollars. If he divorced her, she’d have changed her beneficiary. Now, he stands to collect.”

  “Are you suggesting the insurance could be a motive for doing away with her?”

  “It’s possible, isn’t it?”

  “But not likely if she remains missing. He’d have to wait seven years until she’s declared legally dead in order
to collect.”

  “Seven years isn’t all that long a time,” Mrs. Nesbitt said. “And if her body should turn up and he’s finally arrested, he might be willing to take the chance that some smart lawyer would get him acquitted. Then he’d collect right away. He—”

  The rest of what she was about to say was lost in the sudden whining thunder of a leaf blower. Mrs. Nesbitt’s mouth shaped the word Shit; she stormed away to where Pedro was beginning to swirl leaves and twigs from under one of the taller trees. When she got his attention, she gestured angrily and he shut the thing off in a hurry. I heard her yell at him to keep the damn thing off before she came stomping back to where I was.

  “I hate those things,” she said. “You can’t hear yourself think.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  She took off the straw hat, ran the back of her hand across her forehead. She had the same type of olive skin as her sister, her eyes brown and close-set, her brunette hair cut in a short, feathery style; you could see the resemblance, but for my taste, Alice Cahill was the better looking of the two.

  “James didn’t tell you about the insurance, did he?” Mrs. Nesbitt said. “Made himself out to be a devoted, loving husband. Well, he wasn’t. He treated my sister like dirt, especially when he’d been drinking.”

  “Is he a heavy drinker?”

  “Sometimes. And he can be violent when he’s drunk.”

  “You’re saying she was afraid of him, then?”

  “Of course she was. I tried and tried to convince her she should get him out of the house and out of her life, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Even though they fought constantly and he threatened to ‘put her out of her misery.’ Too timid, too afraid of being alone.”

  “You heard him make that kind of threat?”

  “No, Alice told me. And that he tried to strangle her once. He didn’t tell you about that, either, did he?”

  “Yes, he did. He said the incident happened during one of her anxiety attacks, that he was only trying to embrace her and she misunderstood his intention.”

  “What a damned liar he is. Did he try to blame someone else for Alice being missing?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “Clever. He thinks he’s being clever.” Kendra Nesbitt’s mouth twisted again, this time into a sardonic half grin. “I’ll bet there’s something else he didn’t tell you. About him and Megan Sprague.”

  “Who is Megan Sprague?”

  “I thought not. She works with him at Streeter Manufacturing. Of course he didn’t want you to know he’s been having an affair with her.”

  “How do you know he was?”

  “Never mind how I know. Go ask him if you don’t believe me, watch him sweat. Goddamn cheating men.”

  “Did his wife know?”

  “I told her, yes. A couple of weeks ago, when I found out.”

  “Did she confront him?”

  “No. I wanted her to, but she refused. She didn’t want to believe it was true.”

  “You told the police all this?”

  “Well, of course. But they said they have to have physical evidence that she’s dead and her death was a homicide. He was clever about that, too—whatever he did to her, whatever he did with her body.”

  “And what do you think that is?”

  “How should I know? I just hope somebody finds it soon; that’s the only way he’ll get what’s coming to him.” She put the hat back on, adjusted it. “I’ll get on with my gardening now.”

  Indirect order for me to leave. But I was not quite ready yet to terminate the interview. I asked her the same question I’d asked Cahill: What was her sister’s state of mind the morning of her disappearance?

  “She was upset, panicky. Another argument with James about his affair and he’d threatened her again.”

  “How long did you stay with her?”

  “Not long. A few minutes. She wanted to be alone.”

  “Did you have any other communication with her that day?”

  “No.”

  “Was she expecting anyone else to come by?”

  “No. Too busy finishing another of her silly romance books.”

  “You don’t approve of her writing?”

  “The writing, yes, it gave her something to do with her time. But not what she wrote. Trash. She had some talent, she ought to have put it to better use.”

  “Did you tell her how you felt?”

  “Yes, but she wouldn’t listen.”

  “Did she tell you about the plagiarism claim against her?”

  “No. Why should she? It’s utter nonsense.”

  “But you do know about it.”

  “James called me when he found the e-mails. Smoke screen, an attempt to divert suspicion from himself. The police think so, too.”

  “You and your sister got along well, did you?”

  Mrs. Nesbitt bristled. “What kind of question is that?”

  “A simple one. No friction between you?”

  “Did that bastard tell you there was?”

  “He made a reference to sibling rivalry.”

  “Another of his smoke-screen lies. Alice and I weren’t as close as we were before her accident, but we got along fine. Just fine.” She made an impatient thrusting motion with the clippers. Then, abruptly, “Are you going to keep working for him, after all I’ve told you?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Until and unless there’s a compelling reason not to.”

  “I just gave you several compelling reasons. Or do you think I’m the liar, not him?”

  “I don’t think that, no,” I said. “I have to keep an open mind.”

  “Well, I don’t. We have nothing more to discuss, so don’t come around here bothering me again. You won’t be welcome.” She put her back to me and went stomping back to her rosebushes.

  Complications. He said, she said. The truth might well be somewhere in between, I thought on my way to the car. Dr. Paul Nesbitt would probably side with his wife, but maybe I could get a clearer handle on matters from Fran Woodward. Cahill’s relationship with his wife was a key factor and I needed to get it straight.

  Then there were the joint life insurance policy and his alleged affair with his co-worker to be considered. One hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money, but it’s a pretty thin motive for murder when you have to wait seven years to collect. Very few have that kind of patience when it comes to a large sum of money. And if Cahill had killed his wife, he’d surely have done it in a way that took all suspicion off him—made it look like some kind of accident, one in which the body was found more or less immediately so he could collect the insurance right away.

  Involvement with another woman was a motive only if you mixed in other factors. Cahill might be sleeping with this Megan Sprague, but it didn’t have to be anything more than a casual affair; he’d admitted that he and his wife hadn’t had relations in the last six months, and sexual deprivation coupled with a difficult home life were impetus for some men to look elsewhere. Even if the relationship was a serious love match, a simple divorce made more sense than violence unless Cahill did in fact hate his wife enough to want her dead. But then we were back to the question I’d asked myself earlier: If he’d killed her, whether with premeditation or in a fit of rage, drunken or otherwise, what could he hope to gain by hiring a private investigator?

  It was pretty clear that Cahill hadn’t told me about the affair because he was afraid it would give me cause not to take his case. Same with the insurance, maybe. I would continue to work on his behalf, at least until I had another talk with him, but I’d already marked him down a couple of notches for not being completely open with me. Clients who withhold information, whatever their reason, always make me wary and distrustful.

  5

  JAKE RUNYON

  The cabin where Philip Dennison had died was off an unpaved road on the far side of Eagle Lake, a mile or so from the village. A fairly small A-frame built of unpeeled logs, the roof sections steeply pitched, it was situated
on a low rise close above the curving shoreline. Pines rimmed it closely on one side; a meadow in which wildflowers grew stretched along the other. The place wasn’t isolated; the road passed another, larger A-frame a fifth of a mile distant, and the dock belonging to another, tree-hidden cottage was visible about the same distance farther along.

  Deputy Rittenhouse pulled into the lower part of the meadow, stopped in front of an open-front, slant-roofed lean-to that served as a parking shelter. Patricia Dennison had wanted them to take two vehicles, Runyon driving her, but Rittenhouse had insisted that they all go in his cruiser. Nobody had said a word on the short ride from the substation. Runyon had questions, but he didn’t want to ask them in front of the client.

  When they left the cruiser and started up a slight slope toward the cabin, he had a view of the window in the near-side wall. A short length of new-looking plywood had been nailed across its lower half.

  Rittenhouse noticed his glance in that direction. “We had to break the window to get inside,” he said. “Front door was barred, back doors and windows all locked tight.”

  “Barred? Is that usual up here?”

  “Not usual, no, but some folks, especially second-homers, are security conscious even when they’re in residence.” He smiled faintly. “Afraid of bears and Bigfoot, I guess.”

  Mrs. Dennison was paying no attention to either of them but striding ahead, her gaze fixed on the cabin. There was a porch across the front of it facing the lake, a large window alongside the door with louvered shutters closed on the inside; a nearby path led down to a short dock. She was already standing on the porch when they reached the steps. Her face, set in tight lines, showed nothing of what she was thinking or might be feeling.

  Rittenhouse unlocked the door, but before he opened it he said, “Are you sure you want to do this, Mrs. Dennison?”

  “I’m sure. Why are you trying to talk me out of it?”

  “I’m not; I’m just…” A corner of his mouth twitched; he shook his head. “Five minutes, that’s all the time I can spare.”

  It was cold inside the cabin, a little musty; Philip Dennison evidently hadn’t bothered to air it out during his stay. The broken window’s shutters were folded aside, but not enough daylight filtered in through the top half of the glass to give the room much clarity. Rittenhouse flipped a switch to light a pair of lamps. Mrs. Dennison went to the middle of the room, where she made a slow surveying turn.