(continued)

I grew up in Shelltown, over by the big shipbuilding factory, and I was used to fending for myself. So even though Sticks and I were only fifteen years old, we were scrappy kids. My mom worked in a sandwich joint that fed sailors from the Navy station and factory workers from the shipbuilding company. Never knew Dad. Sticks’ mom was Chinese. His dad died before the war. Sticks grew up in Hong Kong – spoke three or four languages before he was eight, when he came to National City with his mom, who married another Filipino guy who came here as a Navy steward. We hung out together. Me, the barrio fighter, and Sticks, the talker.

Sticks was born to be a businessman. He was buying and selling before he was fifteen. In those days, so much Navy equipment was trucking in and out of the bay: jeeps shipping out to the Pacific, planes being built on one side of the bay and flown on the other. He made inquiries. He found a sailor, a seller ready to make a deal. Even though Sticks was only fifteen, he had accumulated three thousand dollars. Big money! Put together the hard way over the last six months. In Shelltown, that was enough money to get killed over.

Sticks watched all the truck tires being hauled in and out of the Navy warehouses. Too many to keep track of, he figured. He told me that the sailor said he could drive a truck out, loaded with tires, for three thousand—keep the truck. Sticks thought he had it all figured out. National City is a little bit south of San Diego and only half an hour from the Mexican border. Sticks delivers a truck loaded with tires in Tijuana, and he doubles his money. There’s a way into Mexico that bypasses the main gate, and at night you could cross by Smuggler’s Gulch with nobody knowing. Not much of a road—but he convinced me that you got to take chances, right? Or you get nowhere.

So he was supposed to show up with the cash after hours. I came with him, but I was supposed to stay back—he had promised the sailor guy he’d come alone. The warehouse was right off Harbor Drive, next to the bay, and it was after seven o’clock. There was a single light on over the door at the front of the warehouse, and I could see a light on in the little office room they had inside. Otherwise, everything looked dark.

No Shore Patrol in sight, no lights on in the gravel parking lot, so Sticks told me to wait outside while he went in to cut his deal. I couldn’t believe he was really going to pull it off, so I crept up to the window and peeked in.

Sticks stood in front of a big wooden desk. A fat and grizzled guy in fatigues sat behind the desk, with his hands laced behind his head. He was smiling. The window was open, so I could hear what they said.

“You came alone, right?”

“That’s what you said. You got the tires?”

“Oh I got ’em, all right. Where’s the money?” and at this he smiled big. To me it looked like he thought he was calling Sticks’ bluff. That he didn’t think the money would appear. And I could see his eyes widen when Sticks pulled out a packet of cash and dropped it on the table.

“Where’s the keys to the truck?” Sticks asked.

“Not so fast, boyo. Let’s count up your Uncle Sams first.”

Sticks seemed very patient, but I was totally getting freaked out and worried. This guy was making kind of a show of counting the bills and while he grinned about it, it didn’t look like he was paying any attention to Sticks. Until he finished counting.
“All here, boyo. Not bad.” He stood up, and I saw he had a pistol holstered. Not what you expected from a clerk in a warehouse. “We’re done here, kid. Good night, and get your chink ass the hell out.”

Sticks stared at him. “You going to keep my money and not give me my truck and tires?”

“You’re fast, kid.” He drew the pistol. “I’m not going to have to use this, am I?” He pointed the gun at Sticks, then the door. “Scram.”

“I’m not leaving here without my money, or my truck.”

“Shit-for-brains kid.” The clerk got out from behind his desk. I looked around to see if there was anything I could use and spotted a shovel leaning up against the side of the warehouse. I grabbed it and walked quietly over to the door Sticks had entered. The door flung open and Sticks was kicked through it, the clerk coming behind him and telling him to get the hell out. He never saw me, and I doubt he felt the shovel that laid him out. He fell face forward and was silent.

Sticks asked me, “Do you think he’s dead?”

I went over and looked at him. I didn’t want to touch him, but I didn’t see any blood anywhere, and he seemed to be breathing.
“No.”

Sticks went back into the office and opened the desk drawer he’d seen his money go into. He stuck the bills back in his pocket and looked at me. “I don’t think I figured that one out enough.”

“No kidding,” I said.

“Hey, Gus,” he said, and I looked at him straight on. “Gracias, Gustavo,” he said, “I owe you.” That made me feel good. You could tell he really meant it when he used my Christian name.

1
Monday, October 15, 1973

Gary

I shifted the Smith & Wesson Model 10 to a more comfortable place on my hip, which was feeling tender this morning. The bay had a smell of rotting plants, and together with the smell of the diesel it triggered thoughts about the Mekong—which was not so long ago, even if it was half a world way. It was the reason my hip ached, but that life was over. I was back home in San Diego, and glad for it. Whatever I’d thought I was going to accomplish in the Navy’s swift boats turned out to be a bad dream. A nightmare. So the fact that I ended up in the Harbor Police is a whole lot better—but still a whole lot of not much. I was out of the shit storm and into a more peaceful life, but for crying out loud, at twenty-eight here I was with nothing really going on, already going nowhere. But who cared? Other than my dad, I guess, and that only went so far.

Dawn was breaking and the sky was lighting up but still gray, streaked with glowing rose and high silver cloud fingers slipping in from the Pacific. I uncleated the bowline on our patrol boat, the Pt. Loma II, which Mark and I rotated onto this morning. We’ve partnered on the bay patrol before. We’re both uniformed boat jockeys, although the term is used derisively by some. Our jurisdiction is the bay, and it ends at Ballast Point and the passage to the Pacific, so what went on out at sea was not our business. Fine with me. From where the Pt. Loma II was moored on Shelter Island, you could look out straight through the bay’s mouth to the ocean, and the farthest horizon point sea level allowed.

“Casting off,” I said, giving Mark the signal to throttle up as I hopped on deck with the line in my hand. We motored out into the bay, engine loud in the still morning. October in San Diego is like summer in lots of places. The Santa Anas blow a warm wind in from the Anza-Borrego Desert, a wind that blows from land out to sea. Most of the year it’s the other way around. The Pt. Loma II surged forward as we left the protected wake area, and the moment brought on a smile, infrequent these days, as I took in the beauty of the sky: gray giving way to a range of colors, city streetlights still a bright jeweled necklace alongside Harbor Drive, windows in the buildings of the city winking on. There was a light bay chop, a warm breeze, and no one was shooting at me. Felt great. It was peaceful and calming, both of which I appreciated from long disassociation. Then we got a squawk on the VHF radio. This meant the call was from the public, presumably the boating public, and not HQ. We always monitor channel 16.

“This is the Lady Lynn hailing Harbor Police. Lady Lynn at the tuna docks calling for Harbor Police. Do you copy?”

Mark called out to me as I was standing on the bridge and enjoying the view. “It’s the Lady Lynn, Gary—you know these guys, right? You told me—the Coelhos? You want to take this?” I went in and took the mike off the hook of the radio.

“Harbor Police, Lady Lynn. We copy.”

“We need you to come to the tuna docks as fast as you can make it—we’re tied up on the outside quay of the G Street mole. We need you to get here ASAP.”

“Is this an emergency call? Have you got a fire or something?” I didn’t want to say “bomb threat”—we are trained not to go on public channels with those emergencies. “Lights and sirens?”

“No sir,” the radioman from the Lady Lynn reported. “It’s not an emergency, and I don’t really know what it is, but I am sure you are going to want to be here…”

“We’re en route.” I hung up the mike and turned to Mark. “You heard ’em. Let’s boogey.”

There are few things as much fun as punching up the cruiser to make smart time down the bay, so I didn’t have to ask twice. At this hour, the bay was empty of pleasure boat traffic, and there was no Navy activity or shipping scheduled, so we made straight for our goal at twenty knots. We knew those docks. The commercial tuna docks bring a lot of dollars into this community, and always have, since before World War II. The Lady Lynn was one of three purse seiners the Coelhos owned, and I think they also owned some long line ships stationed out of American Samoa. I’d known the family for years. Unlike the TV ads, they were not sorry, Charlie; fishing has been very good for them.

We backed off as soon as we got close to the hull and held station off the side of the vessel. They had the post extended and something was winched out of the water, held suspended above the waterline by a cable looped around it. Day was breaking, it was getting lighter by the minute, and we could clearly see now that it was a barrel. Mark piloted, backing us off a few feet from the starboard side of the hull, while I went out on deck to look up at a crewman I didn’t know, who waved at me to wait a minute. I stood for a minute, and Matt Coelho came to the rail.

He took one look at me and smiled. “Hey, Gary, is that you?” he called down.

“Yeah,” I said, in a normal voice. It was quiet enough that no shouting was needed; the bullhorn could sit in its holder. “What’s up?”

I’d known Matt Coelho since we were at St. Augustine’s together. Catholic high school for boys. His family has been fishing in San Diego for three generations, and I had every reason to believe every word he told me. When my mom was killed, his family was at the funeral.

“Short story,” he said. “That barrel floated in out of nowhere and starts banging on our hull, so my crewman snags it.” He looked up and around. “It was Paco, here.” I looked up at the deckhand Matt gestured to. He looked right at me, but he seemed fidgety and nervous. “We snag it and start to lift it, so it isn’t a marine hazard, you know, and as it comes up we can see it’s draining, like the bottom is full of holes or something. We lift it a little higher, and we can see, yeah, it’s full of holes. The barrel has something in it and it was probably designed to sink, but it turned over and floated, and now it’s here. My guys call me and I figure it’s got to be drugs, right? I don’t want to touch it. I don’t want anyone to touch it. I told them to call you and I got down here myself.”

“So, Matt, if it’s drugs you should call the DEA and wake one of them up.” Then I jokingly swore at him in Spanish for dragging me into this – truth was, I didn’t mind; this was more interesting than just patrolling. My Mexican mom had loved the American sayings – “No time like the present” was one of her favorites.

“I didn’t know who was out on patrol this morning, but I knew someone was. You’re it, buddy. I don’t need a cranky DEA guy at six thirty in the morning.” And we knew it was six thirty because at that moment not only was the sky light, but flights out of Lindbergh Field, by the side of the bay, started roaring off.

Now I had to raise my voice. “OK, pull it up and put it on deck.” I signaled Mark to a clear patch of dock he could ease into and we tied off and walked over to the Lady Lynn, up the gangway to the deck, where the barrel had been laid down on its side. It looked like all the water in it had drained off, so I nodded to Matt and he nodded to a crewman, who walked up with a pry bar and pulled off the perforated barrel end with three sharp moves. The lid clanged on the steel deck like a big coin spinning after a toss. The crewman stepped back, and I walked over to the barrel and knelt down to peer in. It just took a glance.

“Mark,” I said, “call PD, we got a body in here. Looks like a woman in a dress.” Mark pulled his Motorola off of his belt and called it in. “And give Chief Gus a heads-up, too, why don’t you. This is going to stir things up around here…”

We waited on deck; the gentle rocking motion of the tuna boat was a soothing counterpoint to how shocking it felt to find a body in a barrel. I looked up to the bridge of the boat, where I could see my old friend, Captain Matt, who had gone back up the ladder and was behind the glass of the windscreen. I waved him back down.

“You said a crew member named Paco pulled the barrel up?” I asked him. “Where is he? I’m sure PD is going to have some questions. And come to think of it, I have a couple…”

Matt gave me a funny look. Like there was something he wanted to say but couldn’t. “Paco seems to have slipped away. I called for him, but he isn’t here anymore. Could be an immigration thing, you know? The migras might be all over it if he’s questioned. He’s only half Portuguese,” Matt said, looking almost embarrassed about it. “And half Mexican. We brought him on because Tony vouched for him.”

“Don’t give me crap about being half Mexican, Matt, that would have been his good half!” This loosened the light tension, and we both smiled; we’d been through this routine with each other before from school days.

“Tony is half Portuguese and half Chinese,” he said, “so there.” But before we got to continue, two black-and-whites and a Ford Vic drive up through the parking lot and out onto the mole. Lights, no sirens. I went down to meet them.

The dawn was quickly becoming day, big jets were lined up and swooping out of Lindbergh Field, and I waved a couple of uniforms and a detective over to where the barrel lay on its side on the tuna boat deck. Naturally, Mark and I held back from emptying the barrel, because anything we did would likely become a note in some report about how the crime scene was disturbed. Not like they were going to get any prints off of this evidence! Still, we left it as we found it, proper protocol if there is no emergency requiring some immediate response.

The detective, in a rumpled brown suit, squatted down without touching the deck and looked into the barrel. All you could see was what looked like a skinny woman with her knees drawn up, her rump and her feet pointed toward us. The detective nodded at the uniforms and asked them to slide the body out by tilting the barrel up and not touching anything. Once lying on the deck, I could see it was an attractive young woman, kind of Asian looking, wearing nothing but a very thin red dress, which clung to her body, revealing every detail of her. She wore a bra but no panties. The detective rolled the body over and the hands, clasped in front of her as if in prayer, fell down and revealed that the ends of all of her fingers had been chopped or sliced off. Long since bled out, the fingers were protruding stumps of bone from which pale white waterlogged skin had receded.

I saw the detective reach into his jacket pocket and pull out a plastic bag and a glove, and after sliding his hand into the glove he reached out and plucked something from the bra under the dead girl’s dress. It looked like a card of some sort. He held it in front of him as he stood back up. I could see that the card was on some purple glossy paper, but not what it said. “What does it say?” I asked the detective.
“It’s the business card for the owner of a local bar. Says her name is Mona Oakheart. Bar is called ‘Tell No Tales,’” he said. “Heard of it?” he asked me, looking up.

“Nope,” I answered, “it’s a new one on me.”

Mona

I sat in a chair in the shadows, scratching an itch under my bra strap by rubbing against the chair back. It felt like a chigger bite, like I got when I was a kid rolling around in the grass back home. That chigger bite was the most feeling I’ve had all day, ’cause other than that, I felt mostly numb. Like usual. But now I was feeling anxious, even watching something unfold I had seen many times before. There was a woman on the bed, lying on her side under a silk sheet, sleeping even though the room was partially lit. As I watched, a door opened and a man entered. He didn’t even glance at me; he looked only at the sleeping figure, and was pulled toward her as though by wires. The shape of her nipple threw an unnaturally long shadow across the sheet. He pulled off his sweatpants, revealing he was up and ready. He came to the edge of the bed and slowly reached out and put his hand on her hip. She moved gently, as though floating on a wave, and stretched, one leg sliding off the other. His breathing quickened. His hand drifted down her thigh. He stepped away from his pants, naked, and leaned over to slide next to the woman. She murmured lightly, and his eyes widened as her body slid under the soft silk sheet. He lifted it and started to slip in with her…

“Cut!” I got up and walked onto the set. I’m kind of a tall gal, five foot eleven, with long blond hair that I flip around when I get agitated. “You’re supposed to slide the sheet off of her. I don’t need the two of you hidden under the sheet. Capisce?” I shaded my eyes and turned to look at the director, Susan Rancherd. “House lights,” I called out, probably sounded like ‘house latts,’ as you can still hear the Arkansas in this girl, and the bright studio lighting went off as the floods hanging from the warehouse ceiling went on. The studio was a big warehouse space that had been insulated for sound and then painted flat black everywhere except the floor. Studio lights hung on a grid made of two-by-fours hanging from jury-rigged plumbing supplies with extension cords running everywhere, held by duct tape. I grimaced. I may be from Arkansas and she may be from Cali-Bezerkly, but I am payin’ the piper. “Hey, I am counting on you to get the most out of these two and this shoot. I don’t want to jump in and tell you what to do, but jeez, Suze, we talked about this whole scene!”

Suze was pissed. She has a tell; she sort of chills down and gets frosty. I hear a whiny voice in my head: Just because I own the company and built it with my own blood, sweat, and tears doesn’t mean I can stop a shoot on a whim. My inward grin was grim. Oh yes, I sure as hell could. And Suze knew it.

“You’re right, of course,” she said with her lips in a thin smile. “We blocked this out, but our man’s brains are all located in the usual spot…” She turned to the crew. “Let’s set it up to go from the top, OK?” She took my hands in hers, pulled me off of the set, and came up close. “Do me a favor, love? Go take a walk or something. Let me just put this together, as we all agreed? You seem kind of wound up today.”
“Do I seem jumpy?” I said. “Maybe a walk would be a good idea. Did that agent, Patricia, ever show up? She was supposed to come in this morning with some hot new wannabees. She’s late. By a lot.”

“Haven’t seen her. And I don’t plan to leave this set until we get through scene three. I promise.”

I knew this would be best. “Roll it, Suze.” I turned and left the studio.

The studio is a middle unit in an inconspicuous cinderblock building, fronted with rolling steel garage doors, sitting in Kearny Mesa, a somewhat gritty, semi-industrialized suburb of San Diego. Next door, they do cheap bumper repairs. Plumbing supplies are sold at the other end. Insulating for sound cost me a bundle. There are a couple of great Korean restaurants up the street, but otherwise it’s not a nice part of town to walk around in. Those out on the sidewalk were few and far between, either hustling or lurking.

Coming out of that dark studio, I wanted a breath of fresh air and clean light, which quickly became a determination to see the ocean. It must have been the warmth of the sun talking to me – I’m in San Diego and I want to look at the water. My complexion is pale, as I’m not only a born blonde, I haven’t been outside in forever. My powder-blue Mercedes roadster was parked outside in the lot, next to an old Buick Skylark, but even my cute little car couldn’t make me happy these days. I took a deep breath to calm my nerves. Maybe the agent simply wasn’t coming. Fine. I decided to drive down to La Jolla Cove and look at the beach.

I started the car and released the brake, but before I could back out, Annette, one of the gal go-fers, came running out the door and over to me. I waited.

“We just got a call,” she said, breathlessly. “It’s the cops. They want to know if you can go downtown. They got questions as part of an investigation.” She looked at me, expecting a reaction. “I think they mean right now.”

I didn’t bother to ask why—I knew she wouldn’t know. I waved her off and backed out. I knew the route. I sighed and headed off to the PD’s headquarters. I have lived here in San Diego since long before the Beatles played in the park, lately trying to give Hugh Hefner a run for his money. That’s sarcasm, by the way. But I do OK. My little downtown bar, Tell No Tales, throws off enough income to underwrite my little company’s filmmaking, which is where most of my money comes from these days. Triple X. I own the production company. The movies sell all over. You can rent a hotel room in Europe and see my movies right in the room. Not only Europe, either. Hell, it’s the seventies; anything goes. The Supreme Court just ruled that abortion was legal. About time, I thought. The downtown HQ was a short drive from my studio. I’ve had to go to the cops for everything from the terrifying to the routine. I know the drill as well as I know the route to police headquarters. Back in the fifties, you had to be willing to be up-close and personal with them to stay out of trouble. Now I think the opposite is true.
I parked in the police building’s parking lot and locked the car. This wasn’t a great part of town, either. At least I was in my civvies – blue cotton work shirt and bell-bottomed jeans. If I had been dressed in my club owner slit-skirt outfit, especially the one with the spangles, they would have treated me like a whore. That’s what they think I am, anyway. But I know I look good. I don’t wear a wedding ring because I’m not married—but maybe I should.

The desk sergeant watched me enter with an appreciative gaze. I told him who I was and why I was there. He looked me up and down, then motioned for me to wait in one of the plastic molded chairs on the linoleum floor. I wondered if I should have brought a book.

It only took a few minutes before the side door opened and a head with a buzz-cut hairdo leaned out.

“Mrs. Oakheart? Mona Oakheart?” he asked.

“It’s Ms.,” I answered, already walking toward him. He turned and held the door for me and I went into the corridor. Everyone inside was in uniform, except for buzz-cut. He had me follow him to a small office with a metal desk and two metal chairs.

“Detective James Exeter.” He stuck his hand out for me to shake. “But everyone calls me Jim. Did they tell you why we called?”
“No, my assistant just ran out and said to come down here…”

He motioned me into a chair. “This morning, a fisherman down by the G Street mole called in to tell Harbor Police about a barrel bobbing on the bay. The Harbor jockeys sent a boat and had the barrel pulled in.” He looked up. “It was found to contain a body. Like, deceased. Fully dressed, with no identification except for this.” He leaned over and showed me a plastic bag that held a business card. It was the distinctly purple card from my downtown club, Tell No Tales. “Any idea why this person should have your business card on them?”

“I have no idea. Maybe if I knew who this person was…”

“We haven’t yet identified the body. Have you ever been called to identify a body before?”

“Once.”

He looked at me and then said, “Let’s roll and I’ll explain.”

We took Jim’s car to the morgue, an unmarked Ford with those shiny moonlike wheel hubs and antenna that said “Police Car” all over them. Just in case anyone was wondering. Jim was talking, but I didn’t hear him. I stared out the window, lost in my own memories. The task of identifying a dead body was tangled up in my own screwed-up history. And it all started when I first came to San Diego. Was it twenty years ago? Fresh off the Greyhound from Arkansas, where a skinny boy on his way to be a Marine offered to help me escape to San Diego. Daddy had come back from the Korean War, and he and I had both changed. He had become deranged and I grew tits. His stares scared the shit out of me. Ma was playing like she didn’t see anything and I was having none of it. My first job in San Diego delivering liquor led to supplying it for high-profile events, which led to the best and the worst thing that ever happened to me…

“You’ve been somewhere else while I’ve been explaining the situation, haven’t you?” His voice cut through my reverie. Unperturbed, Jim went on. “OK, what’s Tell No Tales all about?” he asked me as we turned off Pacific Coast Highway.
“You’ve never been there?”

He shook his head and grinned.

I smiled. “It’s a first-rate club. Took me years to build it. We get a good customer, lots of Navy and also ship workers. We get people off of the Pacific Coast Highway. Our girls are all smart and good-looking. Miniskirts, halter tops. Nothing pushes the limits. We usually have a little music going on. You should drop by and check us out.”

“Kind of a rough neighborhood down there on Fifth Avenue.”

“I know. I’m right next door to Wyatt Earp’s old place. They’ve got a plaque on the wall so you don’t miss it. Every few months, someone forgets it’s the seventies and we have a shoot-out on the street.”

Jim turned and gave me a look. “That’s something I know a little bit about,” he said.

Then we were pulling into the underground parking for the county building, where the morgue was stuffed in between some other nameless administrative necessities. I followed Jim through a door with a pebbled glass window advising us we were indeed at the morgue, and we went into a place that smelled heavily of disinfectant, and not much else.

A bedraggled assistant in a beehive hairdo sat behind a counter. She looked up and you could tell she knew Jim. With a minimum of words, she turned to lead us to the big room with all the locker doors. Except they weren’t lockers.

“They won’t get to the autopsy for a while yet, so she’s in the freezer.”

“She?” I asked, with a tremor in my voice.

In answer, Jim nodded to the gal, who pulled out a table from the locker. The body under the sheet was clearly a woman. Exeter pulled the sheet back to her neck. I’d had only one meeting with her, but I immediately recognized the woman on that shelf. Her dark hair was plastered to her scalp, and her skin was waxy and very pale beige in the stark fluorescent lighting. There was still a trace of mascara around her eyes. Thank God her eyes were closed.

I put my hand to my throat. “Oh my God,” I said. “I know this woman. She told me her name is Patricia Peteaut. She was supposed to meet with me earlier today.”

“For what?” Jim asked me, nodding his head sideways to have her rolled back into the freezer.

“She’s a—was a—theatrical agent. She was supposed to be bringing a couple of potential actresses. For movies I make. Oh my God—what happened to her fingers?!” I looked down at the arms, lying outside of the sheet, and was shocked to see that the tip of each finger had been cut off. I could only imagine…

“Let’s go back downtown so I can take a statement, OK?” Exeter took my elbow and steered me out toward the lobby. I nodded and allowed him to take me back to the car. The drive back to the PD was tense, and my answers to Jim’s questions got shorter, images from the morgue rising in front of me. Especially her hands.

Soon we were back in Jim’s office, making the official statement. It started out easy: name, address, and so on; but it was relentless and soon felt like an inquisition. I had no illusions about my own role as a person of interest in all this. Jim no longer felt like a “Jim.” More like a “Detective Exeter.” We spent a lot of time on who I work with in my business—the films and the club—and what I do. Every time he asked a question, he laboriously wrote out my answer. It was almost an hour before we turned to Patricia, and he asked what I knew about her.
I told him, “She called me Friday, saying that she was supplyin’ talent to other SoCal moviemakers and thought she could bring me models and actresses I would want to use. Naturally I said ‘sure,’ and we met at my club on Saturday to look at some head shots. They looked fine, so she was supposed to come back today with a couple of hopefuls. I was waiting for her down at the studio this morning.”

“Where did she get her, um, actresses?” The way Jim said the word you could tell he was trying to be nice, as he obviously didn’t think of them as actresses at all. Just trying to flatter as much information out of me as he could. No surprises there.

“It’s not like I know; I never met any of them—but I know that most of the talent comes from LA, especially the Valley,” I said. “Then there’s Tijuana and Guam. And Manila. It’s a big opportunity for some. Everybody is over eighteen and no one does what they don’t want to. I care about the people who work for me. At least while they’re in my house and on my team.”

“Somebody went to some trouble to make it tough for us to identify the body. No fingers—no prints, you know. Why would they do that, and then leave us a card so we could get you to ID her for us?”

“I have no idea. I have no idea.”

“Where did Ms. Peteaut come from? What was her background?” He made a little show out of the “Ms.”

“All I know about her is what I learned on Friday and during our meeting on Saturday. I never heard of her before that. She said she worked with some production companies out of Burbank and San Diego and she was tired of the drive. She said she wanted to relocate because she didn’t like being on the freeway, so she was shifting all her efforts to San Diego. I don’t know who else she worked with, really. She was an agent” (didn’t that say everything?). I looked at my watch and realized I hadn’t had any lunch. “Can I go home now? I need a break.”
Jim looked over his notes. “Sure, I have enough for now. I’ll take you back out to the reception area with the desk sergeant. Wait for me there; I’ll get your statement typed up and you’ll have to sign it.”

I went back out to the reception room and sat in a molded plastic chair. The place was deserted; it must have been a quiet day for crime in San Diego. After about half an hour, the outside door opened and a guy in a uniform different from the others in the building came in. His wasn’t blue—he wore green pants and a tan shirt. He carried a pistol on his hip. I looked outside and saw he had parked a truck that was identified as Harbor Police. Dark hair, some tan to the tint of his skin. He turned to me and gave me an appraising look, smiled, and then turned to the hall door where buzz-cut Jim was getting my statement ready. Not that I cared these days, but he looked good from my brief peek at him. He had a funny walk—looked like he was favoring a leg—but he made it work. Nice butt.

It was another hour before I saw Jim again, with a few pages of typed statement taken from our conversation. At this point, whatever there was of my good humor had fizzed out. In his office, I read the statement quickly. It seemed like what I had told him, so I signed it and got up, turning to leave.

“By the way, Ms. Oakheart, you know that I will likely need to talk to you again as we learn more about this. This is murder, with overtones that will be – well, you can bet the press will be all over it. I’m just getting started. You aren’t planning any trips in the next couple of weeks, are you?”

Even though I was inside and fans were blowing, I was aware that it was October, and the Santa Anas were blowing hot, dry air into town from the mountains. That puts everyone on edge. In this close-windowed reception room, I still felt sticky. I didn’t have any travel plans until November.

“No, Jim, I’m not going anywhere.”

I got a grim smile from Jim. “Here,” he said, handing me a card. “Keep this. Call me if you think of anything else.” He turned back to return to his office while I headed out to my car. Through the lobby, stuffy with two standing fans, to a hot, dry parking lot. The air felt scratchy.

As I opened my little car’s door, I heard the glass doors to the police building swish open behind me. I looked up, and saw the good-looking young cop from the Harbor Police walk out. He veered slightly and came over to me. His truck was parked next to my roadster.

“Hey,” he said. “Hold on. You knew the vic, right? I was on duty. I was there when they pulled the barrel out of the bay and opened it up. You heard about the card they found, right? Exeter said you own the club.”

I took in his earnest face with a sideways glance. “You mean my good friend Jim?” I asked.

He smiled, then came over and reached out a hand. “Gary Reines. You’re Mona Oakheart, right? Jim said you own Tell No Tales.”

I took his hand in mine. “Reines, huh. I knew a Reines once and you look more like a Garcia.” I smiled at him. “Just talkin’. Look, Gary, I’m beat and this has been one hell of a day. Drop by the club sometime, but not today. I’m going to get something to eat.”

For a minute I thought Gary was going to ask me some questions, but he got the drift, smiled, and told me he would drop by some day. He stood by his truck while I dropped into the seat of the Mercedes. The leather was hot to the touch after being exposed to the sun—even in October. I needed a drink. The club was only about a dozen blocks away, so I wouldn’t need a pay phone to call the studio and tell them what was up. I glanced up at young Gary, then started up the Benz, rolled it backwards and allowed myself the pleasure of dropping it into first, popping the clutch and zipping neatly around, out of the parking lot and toward Fifth Avenue downtown.