Chapter 16

On Saturday morning I drove north on Highway 101 to Petaluma, in southern Sonoma County. The area, with its rolling hills, had first been settled by the coastal Miwok Indians. Then Alta California became an outpost of Spain. A huge land grant, Rancho Petaluma, was given to General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, the Commandant of the San Francisco Presidio. The adobe house he built in 1836 still stands near Petaluma, one of the best-preserved buildings of its era in Northern California.

I steered my Toyota into the right lane and drove across a bridge, glancing down at the Petaluma River, which flows into the upper reaches of San Francisco Bay and made the city, chartered in 1858, a center of trade as flat-bottomed boats called scows sailed between Petaluma and San Francisco, carrying agricultural produce and other materials. The chicken-and-egg business flourished here in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At one time the city was known as the “Egg Capital of the World” and one of the big local celebrations, called Butter and Egg Days, is in April.

I left the freeway, heading downtown, where iron-fronted Victorian commercial buildings line several streets, survivors of the 1906 earthquake that left Petaluma relatively unscathed. The older neighborhoods surrounding the downtown area are full of Victorian-era homes, Queen Anne, Eastlake and Stick Gothic.

Mrs. Roberta Cook had lived on Liberty Street, a few blocks northwest of the city’s commercial center. The one-story Queen Anne house was built high off the ground, with a driveway on the right leading to a detached garage at the back. The structure had the usual Victorian-style curlicues, including fishscale siding. It was painted pale blue with darker blue trim and bright yellow flourishes, the color nearly matching that of the yellow roses blooming in front of the porch railing. A FOR SALE sign stood in the front yard, with a Plexiglas pocket on the base, containing information sheets about the house. I parked my car and got out, plucking a sheet from the pocket. The house dated to 1902 and the asking price made me wince. It would probably sell for that, though. It was a lovely house, obviously well-kept.

I returned the sheet to the pocket and walked toward the porch, examining the front steps, eight of them. Someone had installed safety measures, applying non-skid strips to each step and adding grab bars to the original porch railings, so someone on the stairs could hold onto a bar with each hand. I saw another grab bar just outside the front door. At the bottom of the porch, the original railings ended in a couple of squat, pyramid-shaped ornaments. The mailbox was attached to a post, about six inches from the base of the steps, on the left as I faced the house. Mrs. Cook had supposedly slipped on these steps, wet from the rain, and tumbled down, hitting her head as she fell. I could see how it might have happened. The non-skid surface didn’t extend the full width of the steps. If Mrs. Cook’s foot had landed on one of the smooth portions, she could have slipped. I walked toward the house and ran my fingers over those pointy pyramids. They felt like solid wood and they could have caused some serious damage to a skull.

“Are you going to buy this house?” a voice demanded behind me.

I turned and looked at the woman who stood near the FOR SALE sign. She was elderly, but spry, short and wiry, with white hair and a determined expression. On this June morning she wore bright blue pants and a matching floral shirt. She carried a canvas shopping bag draped over her left shoulder and a bright pink fanny pack cinched around her middle.

I walked toward her. “I can’t afford to buy this house.”

She sniffed. “It’s priced too high, in the middle of a recession. Lots of lookers, but no takers. It’ll sell eventually, though. It’s a really nice house. I just hope whoever buys it will be a good neighbor.”

“Where do you live?” I asked.

“Next door.” She pointed north, at a modest Stick Victorian house. “Fifty-two years I’ve lived here. Almost as long as the woman who lived in this house. She died. I found her.”

“Did you?” Just the person I wanted to talk with.

“They said she fell down the steps.” She sniffed again, a derisive sound.

“But you don’t believe that?”

A pair of sharp brown eyes looked me up and down. “If you’re not interested in buying a house, why are you here? Are you lurking?”

I smiled at the word. “I didn’t think I was lurking.” But I was.

“Listen, honey, I’ve been watching you all the time I walked up the street. I read lots of mysteries. I know lurking when I see it. Are you a cop?”

“No. Why do you think I’m lurking? Were you expecting a cop?”

“Because my friend was murdered. I want somebody to do something about it.”

Bingo. I held out my business card. “I’m not a cop. I’m a private investigator. And I’d really like to talk with you.”

Her eyes widened. “A private eye. Like Sharon McCone or Kinsey Millhone?”

“Yes, something like that.”

“Well, Jeri Howard, I’m Sadie Espinosa. Come on over to my house and let’s have us a talk.”

I followed Mrs. Espinosa to her own house. She had the same sort of fall-prevention setup. She unlocked the front door. A pair of cats greeted us in the foyer. One, a calico, meowed softly, while the other, a big orange tom, gave my shoes a thorough examination. “That’s Poppy,” Mrs. Espinosa said, indicating the calico. “And the big orange boy is Ducks.”

“Hey, Ducks.” I knelt and scratched his ears. He purred loudly, left off sniffing my shoes and rubbed his head and body against my charcoal gray slacks, leaving a liberal coating of orange hair.

Mrs. Espinosa beckoned me to follow her into the kitchen. On the far side of the counter was a family room with a wide-screen flat-panel TV fastened to the wall. Below it shelves contained DVDs and videotapes. Opposite the TV were two recliners. A carpeted kitty gym stood in front of the window that looked out on the backyard.

She deposited her shopping bag and fanny pack on the counter. Then she poured a couple of glasses of iced tea, handed one to me, and lifted the lid on a plastic container of cookies on the kitchen counter. She put several on a plate and grabbed a fistful of paper napkins from a nearby holder. “Peanut butter-chocolate chip. I made ’em yesterday. Pretty good, if I do say so myself.”

“Oh, my, yes,” I said, after taking a bite. Now I had gooey dark chocolate smeared on my hands. I took one of the napkins and followed Mrs. Espinosa to her living room. She set the plate on the coffee table and put a cookie on a napkin, setting that and her glass on an end table. She settled into a wing chair to the left of the fireplace and Poppy, the calico cat, jumped onto her lap. I sat on the sofa opposite her. Ducks, my new best friend, plopped down next to me. He kneaded my thigh with his big paws and rumbled with his big purr. With every movement he shed more orange hair.

“Your clothes will be covered,” she said, nibbling on her cookie.

“It’s just cat hair. It’ll brush off.” I sipped my tea. “So tell me about Mrs. Cook.”

She stroked the calico cat. “We were good friends. She was two years younger than me. I’m eighty-one. Both widows. My husband passed on six years ago and hers had been gone ten years. He was a lot older than she was. Anyway, she was getting on, but she wasn’t doddery, if you know what I mean. Very independent, like me. We did lots of things together, playing Scrabble, going for walks, driving over to the library. She was a big mystery fan, too. We’d go to the Cinnabar Theater here in Petaluma, if they were showing something interesting. We both loved old movies. We’d have a DVD night, watching movies on my big screen, with a big bowl of buttered popcorn.”

“What kind of movies did Mrs. Cook like?” I asked.

Mrs. Espinosa smiled. “Anything with Joan Crawford. Roberta liked film noir and those women’s pictures from the forties. Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, and Greer Garson: three-hankie pictures, you know. Now me, I love Westerns. Give me Randolph Scott, Joel McCrea, and Audie Murphy. So we’d mix and match. Oh, and we’d watch a lot of those BBC miniseries. Upstairs, Downstairs and Poldark, that sort of thing.”

“Sounds like fun.”

Mrs. Espinosa sighed. “Yes, I miss it. I still watch the movies and pop the corn, but it’s not the same without her.”

“Tell me what happened the day you found her body.”

“It was cold and rainy. A big storm blew in early that morning and it rained like the dickens, coming down hard and sideways. It was a good day to stay indoors. I built a fire and sat here drinking tea and reading.” Mrs. Espinosa indicated the fireplace between us. A wicker basket full of books sat at the base of her recliner, all mysteries, I saw, recognizing titles and authors’ names.

“It rained off and on all afternoon, sometimes hard, then there’d be a lull. I had some stew cooking in the Crock-Pot, so I called Roberta about one o’clock, to invite her over for an early dinner and a movie. She said she’d come over at four. The mail comes around three, maybe a little before. I saw the carrier go by but I didn’t notice the time. I went out to check my own mailbox. I didn’t see Roberta then, so she must have been inside. It started raining again, not as hard as before, just sprinkling off and on. Four o’clock came and went and Roberta didn’t come over. I called and she didn’t answer the phone. So I went outside. There she was at the bottom of the porch steps.”

Mrs. Espinosa compressed her lips into a tight line. “There was blood on her head. I had my cell phone with me. I always carry it in my pocket. So I called nine-one-one. The paramedics came, and the police. I told that detective it wasn’t an accident, but nobody listens to little old ladies.”

“What was the detective’s name?”

She screwed up her face, trying to remember. “Harper, Hooper, something like that. He gave me his card but I don’t know if I kept it. I’ll look for it, and let you know.”

“Thanks, that would be helpful. My cell phone number is on my business card. What makes you so sure Mrs. Cook’s death wasn’t an accident?”

“She was careful. You saw the fall-prevention stuff on her porch and mine. Grab bars and non-skid, inside the house, and out. We had that done several years ago, at the same time, both of us doing whatever we could to prevent falls. She wanted to stay in her own home as long as she could, just like me.”

“Accidents do happen.”

“Not to Roberta,” she said stubbornly. “The steps weren’t that wet. The porch overhangs them. She always held on with both hands whenever she went up and down those steps. I just don’t see how she could fall and hit her head. I think somebody pushed her down the steps, or hit her on the head and tried to make it look like an accident. I told the policeman that, but he said I’d been reading too many mysteries.”

“I understand Mrs. Cook collected movie memorabilia.”

“Yes, and it was valuable, too,” Mrs. Espinosa said. “She had a lot of things from Joan Crawford movies, including a poster from Mildred Pierce, in really good condition. And Sudden Fear, that movie from the fifties. The most valuable piece, I think, was the poster from a movie called Rain, because that one dated back to nineteen thirty-two, before the Hollywood Code. Roberta called that poster a three-sheet. It was pretty big. Anyway, she said the poster was in mint condition because it had never been folded and didn’t have any tears. She also said it was linen-backed, whatever that means. Anyways, she told me that poster from Rain was worth ten thousand dollars.”

“I imagine she had dealers contacting her all the time.”

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Espinosa said. “Dealers were always after her to sell her stuff, either pieces or the whole collection. She’d turned down several offers over the years. I told her she really should make an inventory, get an estimate on the value from a reputable dealer, and put the inventory in her safe deposit box. She said that was a really good idea and she would do that. But I don’t think she had when she died.”

“So what happened to her collection?”

Mrs. Espinosa frowned. “Her son sold it to the first person that made him an offer. I’ll bet he got taken. It serves him right. He’s so greedy. All he could think about was the house. He couldn’t wait to clear out her things and put that house on the market.”

“Do you have any idea who bought Mrs. Cook’s collection?” I asked.

“I do, because I saw them loading it into a rental truck,” Mrs. Espinosa said. “It was the dealer who visited her earlier, back in February. She asked me to be at her house for the appointment, just to be on the safe side. She didn’t want to be alone with the pair of them. In fact, she told me she didn’t want to sell, but this dealer was very persistent. He kept calling her, asking to see the collection. She finally agreed to let him look. He made an offer, but she turned him down. That was the end of it, I thought.”

“There were two men?”

“Yes. A younger man, maybe in his forties or fifties. But the other fellow, why, he was as old as me. Had to be eighty if he was a day. I saw them twice, when they looked at the collection, and later, when they took it away. And in between, before Roberta died, I saw the old man. Where was it? I know. It was in Copperfield’s bookstore downtown. Roberta had ordered a book. I was with her the day she picked it up.”

I asked Mrs. Espinosa to describe the men and the vehicle they’d been driving the day they made an offer to Mrs. Cook. The younger man was tall and skinny with dark hair, she said. The older man was short and slight of build. Her response left me no doubt that the dealer who’d visited Mrs. Cook was Chaz Makellar, accompanied by his elderly employee, Henry Calhoun. I had printed several photos of Chaz and Raina Makellar and Henry Calhoun, the pictures I’d taken with my cell phone camera that day in Alameda when they’d unloaded merchandise from the SUV. Now I took those from my purse and handed them to Mrs. Espinosa. “Would you please take a look at these photos and see if you recognize any of these three people?”

She examined the snapshots closely and then nodded. “Yes, that’s them. The men, anyway. I’ve never seen that woman before. But the men, definitely. I particularly remember the old man, since I saw him in the bookstore.” She returned the photos to me.

“When did the dealers come look at the collection?” I asked.

“Must have been early February. Yes, it was. Before President’s Day weekend.”

“And when did you see the older man in the bookstore?”

She had to think about that for a moment. “You know, I think it was a week before she died. Late February or early March. But I’m not completely sure.”

Before I left Mrs. Espinosa’s house, I asked if she had contact information for Mrs. Cook’s son. She did. He lived in San Mateo, on the Peninsula south of San Francisco. I wrote down his name and phone numbers. I wanted to talk with him as well as the detective who’d investigated Mrs. Cook’s death, but both interviews would have to wait. I had a funeral to attend. I thanked Mrs. Espinosa for her hospitality, brushed orange cat hair from my gray slacks, and left Petaluma, driving north towards Healdsburg.