I had absolutely no doubt that Katrina had been planning to expose me—or, more likely, threaten to expose me if I didn’t relax my opposition to her client’s condo development. With the stolen file in my own hands, at least no one in her office had access to that information about me, and I could choose to tell my story, or not, in my own time. I’d stolen her dossier on my neighbors with less of a clear motive. One or two had done a recent volte-face on the condo development, and I was sure I’d find the reason for their change of heart in the second file. I’d felt justified, protective even, when I saw it there, but I wasn’t sure reading it gave me any high ground. Eventually, I decided I was just curious, and found I could live with that.
When I finally steeled myself to open the dossier late that evening, I found a sketch of each person’s life, based on their education and job history and, sometimes, their real estate holdings. Nat, for example, owned a cabin in Wyoming, which, while interesting (he seemed like such a quintessential city person to me, even though he’d started life in Texas) hardly provided material for blackmail. The papers weren’t in any particular order, and most people had just a single sheet of paper, headed with their name, and date and place of birth. A few had articles or photos attached.
Ruth D’Allessio (nee Lyons), who lived next to one of the vacant buildings with her husband, had been arrested, twice, for participating in anti-war demonstrations, once in 1968 and again in 2007, which probably says more about America’s bellicose history than Ruth’s temper and penchant for kicking police officers. She had a woodshop in the decommissioned Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, where she designed and produced uncomfortable chairs beloved of decorators and collectors. She trained and employed young men and women who’d somehow escaped the local gang culture that put guns in the hands of children and provided the community with untold hours of entertainment in the form of regular drive-by shootings. Her membership in Grandmothers Against Gun Violence made a lot of sense in that context.
Nothing there seemed blackmail-worthy.
Her husband, Professor D’Allessio, had been a respected professor at UC Berkeley and had written several books on Italian Renaissance drama. I was surprised there was enough to say about it to fill one book, let alone five. There was a translation of an Italian newspaper article accusing him of plagiarism, but nothing had come of it and, while faintly shadowed by occasional reminders of the accusation in Italy, once he’d moved to the US, he left it behind, and his reputation here was unsullied. He accompanied Ruth on her anti-war marches (there was a photo of them together in handcuffs). Rather than damaging his academic standing, his activism seemed to enhance it. After he was pepper sprayed, and the ACLU won a judgment on his behalf, he was given tenure by the university.
The plagiarism accusation was too old to do him any harm, even if it came to light. I poured myself another glass of wine and turned the page. Moving on.
Sabina Talbot (nee D’Allessio) was a UC Berkeley alumna, a philosophy major, and a bonded motorcycle messenger and international courier until her marriage. There was a fairly lengthy list of the countries and cities she’d traveled to, often in parts of the world where postal service was unreliable or nonexistent. She’d been to Kiev and Albania numerous times, for example. She’d had an affair with a rich, married tech billionaire for more than a year. Sabina had always refused to identify him. I read his name and then wished I didn’t know. She had married Kurt Talbot and the tech billionaire’s baby (Sebastian) was born three months later.
The only thing I saw in Sabina’s history that might cause trouble for her was the identity of her baby’s father. If he didn’t know about the baby, he might fight her for custody; maybe that’s what Katrina was planning to threaten her with.
Her husband, Kurt, was an eye surgeon with privileges in several San Francisco hospitals. He’d interned at a famous Florida eye institute, but earlier, he’d been caught up in an investigation of medical students selling prescription drugs. He’d been exonerated, but several of his classmates weren’t so lucky, and their medical careers were cut short. Reading between the lines, Kurt’s well-to-do family had put him in the hands of a PR specialist who made sure his name was kept out of the media.
Okay, I could see that coming back to bite him. A doctor’s reputation was his stock-in-trade; no one wants to put themselves in the hands of a surgeon with a shady past. He and Sabina had been very vocal in their opposition to the condo, which I’d always assumed had something to do with supporting the D’Allessios, who were furiously opposed to it. Then, about a month before Katrina’s murder, they had stopped attending meetings and generally muted their responses to overtures to attend protests or participate in letter campaigns. So—either Katrina or something else had changed their minds.
Katrina’s journalist cousin, Gavin Melnik, had been raised in Poland by adoptive parents and attended a Swiss university called ETH, which left their graduates sounding as if they had a severe lisp. (“Where did you go to school?” “Thankth for athking; I went to ETH.”) I giggled immoderately at my own humor and decided I’d probably had too much wine on an empty stomach. I stopped reading long enough to make myself a cheese sandwich before settling in again. Gavin emigrated to the US when he was in his early twenties, after his parents’ death in an auto accident, and he’d lived in San Francisco for twelve years. He was a little younger than he looked—only thirty-four—and his work history was spotty, but that’s almost expected for a writer. After seeing some of the top-flight magazines he’d written for, I had a new appreciation for the uncertain life of a freelance journalist, since Katrina had given the impression he lived with her as a sort of general dogsbody and gofer because he couldn’t afford a place of his own.
Nothing there seemed worth threatening him in any way, and he wasn’t a property owner, so his support or opposition to the condo shouldn’t have had much impact.
Jesus and Luis Aguardo, who lived in a flat on the other side of the empty buildings, were married in the window that had briefly opened in 2004, when San Francisco was an outlier, before marriage equality became the law of the land. They leased their flat in the Gardens and, when they weren’t travelling, spent a lot of time at their Architectural Digest–worthy home in Mendocino. They owned a successful wine and beverage company with outlets throughout California, famous for both their private label wines and for their exclusive offerings from small, specialty wineries. In 2012, they were sued by the bereaved parents of an underaged teen who had purchased half a dozen bottles of wine with a fake ID, managed to drink it all in a matter of hours and died from alcohol poisoning. The court case had been brutal, the teen exposed as a binge drinking alcoholic, his parents vilified as uncaring and interested only in the financial settlement of their lawsuit. The mother had committed suicide within six months. The father’s whereabouts were unknown.
Jesus and Luis weren’t culpable in the teenager’s death, and the entire saga had played out in the media, so there didn’t seem to be anything they could be blackmailed with. Katrina had headed their victorious legal team, so if she were planning to blackmail them, she’d been double-dipping.
Angela Lacerda was a different story. She was younger than everyone else in the dossier and lived in the flat underneath the Aguardos. She had undergone an abortion when she was in high school. She was about to marry into a wealthy Catholic family with historic roots in the city and a well publicized, not to say fanatical, opposition to abortion. The file speculated that her current fiancé might be unaware of her history. She owned several small pieces of property in the East Bay, mostly vacant lots, judging from the description. She rented her apartment—she didn’t own property in the Gardens—but her prospective family were influencers; Katrina might have been hoping that with the right persuasion, like a threat to tell her prospective in-laws about her abortion, Angela would bring them into the fight on her client’s behalf.
Having finished the dossier, and feeling as if I needed another shower, I stuffed it behind my pillow and tried to get to sleep. I was awake for another couple of hours. Reading it had been spectacularly unhelpful. I knew things I wished I didn’t, and I couldn’t see how any of it was useful in the investigation into Katrina’s death unless I went to talk to the people involved. And if I did that, how did I explain knowing any of what I’d learned?