By the time Nat and I left the scene, it was still only midmorning, but it felt like the end of a very long day. I didn’t open Aromas, and Nat left the coffee chop closed—the street was still barricaded, and only residents were being permitted on the block anyway. I spent what was left of the morning and most of the afternoon trying not to remember how Katrina had looked when I found her, and taking phone calls from friends and neighbors, all of whom were agog, and couldn’t wait to share their Katrina stories with me.
I heard about arguments over rubbish bins; complaints about loud music, some of which ended in police visits; fights over untrimmed shrubs blocking the sunlight to her downstairs rooms; the bitterness over her new window awning, which blocked the sunlight to someone else’s rooms; I heard about babies being awakened by jackhammers, whatever they were, and, flying high and above everything else, impotent fury over the condo development she was championing. As a resident, she was entitled to attend association meetings, which she often did, and devising a coherent strategy to oppose the condo was impossible with her in the room. So I also heard about her threats of legal action over proposals to exclude her from the meetings for a conflict of interest. Katrina wasn’t gracious in victory, and she didn’t come off well in any of the stories. I was exhausted just hearing them.
Nat and I were together in my flat, and he’d spent a lot of time on the phone, too. In midafternoon he put together a meal for us. He insisted a salad of greens with a lemon and olive oil dressing would go down—and stay down—since it wasn’t likely to bring up any unpleasant associations. We’d eaten the salad, and drunk a little too much wine, and then more or less collapsed on a couple of chairs in the living room. I still didn’t have much in the way of furniture, but Ben had found the George Nelson armchairs somewhere; Grandfather had given me a large and valuable oriental rug; Nat had chosen the peacock blue velvet couch for me, and the coffee table with its splotches of gold leaf had been made by a friend. I was lucky because if it was up to me, the place would still be empty and I’d be sitting on the floor.
Light from the window left one side of Nat’s face in shadow. I picked up my new camera and raised an eyebrow, asking him for permission. He shrugged, and I took a couple of quick shots. “Turn slightly this way. That’s it. Beautiful.”
“I feel so objectified.” He wandered over to take the camera from my hand. “Nice piece of hardware.”
“Retail therapy,” I said.
Nat knew why I might need some retail therapy, and he looked sympathetic. “No word from Ben?”
“He can’t while he’s deployed.” I swallowed a sudden lump in my throat, and grasped for a change of topic before Nat started to rehash Katrina’s murder—again. He wouldn’t leave it alone, and I’d had enough. “Hey, here’s something I haven’t told you. Haruto saw me taking a few photos downstairs, and now I have to take the photos for this year’s calendar.” I grabbed a couple of the old calendars from the firewood bin.
He chuckled and put down the camera. “Better you than me.”
“Here’s the one with the doorways leading into the Gardens.”
He leafed through the pages and showed me a door painted with a six-foot Harley insignia. “That one brought in some real strange visitors to the Open Garden two years ago.”
“And here’s the Pets of Fabian Gardens year.”
“I’ve never thought Mrs. Oyarzun’s Chinese Crested looks like ‘a skinned rabbit with a pompadour,’ but that’s just me.” He tossed the calendar back to me. “There was nearly bloodshed that year. Too many pets; not enough pages in the calendar. Made the meetin’s fun though.” Nat loved the neighborhood association meetings; he e-mailed unofficial “minutes” full of snarky sidebars to his cronies, including me.
I flipped through the crumpled pages. It was an odd little anachronism, in a way, but it had its devotees, and no one on the board wanted to be responsible for eliminating it from the budget. Every Fabian Gardens household received a copy, and it hung in utility rooms and kitchens, usually a month or two behind the current date.
“I’ll probably stick to flowers. Everyone likes flowers, right?”
“Yeah,” he drawled. “You might want to stay away from Georgia O’Keeffe close-ups of the naughty bits.”
“Oh, God.”
He smirked and flopped back into his chair, leaning down to stroke Lucy’s belly, which she had presented for rubbing. I’d adopted Lucy as a stray, only later realizing that Shakespeare had her in mind when he wrote, “though she be but little, she is fierce.” Not that I know much about Shakespeare beyond a few quotes, but he’s hard to avoid at school in England, even when you try. Lucy was a small, bad-tempered terrier of some kind; she tolerated me and adored Nat. The jury was still out on Ben, although he was making inroads when he was here, largely due to his habit of giving her scraps of bacon at breakfast.
Nat kept up the rhythmic stroking, and Lucy closed her eyes. Nat resumed picking at the details of Katrina’s murder. “Why didn’t they just snatch Katrina’s briefcase instead of riflin’ it? Wasn’t that kinda weird? Took time, and you’d think they’d be in a big hurry to get the hell away.”
I gave him a sharp look, interested in spite of my genuine desire to forget the details. “You’re right—if it was just some random robbery gone wrong, they’d grab the briefcase and run. Maybe it was someone from the neighborhood who didn’t want to risk having anyone see them with it.” It had a band of Russian-looking geometric designs incised into the leather, definitely one of a kind, and difficult to pass off as something from Target or the local luggage store.
“So something personal? It had to be big. I know she was a pain in the ass, but if that was enough to get someone killed, half the neighborhood would be killin’ the other half.”
I thought of all the fights I’d heard about and came up with what seemed like the most pressing, or at least the one with the most money at stake. The real estate market in San Francisco was the hottest in the country; ramshackle cottages in the outer neighborhoods were selling for more than a million dollars. A one-car garage in the Mission District had recently sold for $300,000. “What if it was someone who thought it would prevent the condo development somehow?”
Nat made a “maybe” grimace. Two of our residents had recently sold their adjoining buildings for princely amounts to Amos Noble, a notorious developer of third-rate condominium buildings. He’d used a straw buyer to hide his interest until it was too late for the sellers to change their minds, which was generally agreed to be underhanded. He and Katrina had made no bones about his plan to demolish the two buildings. So far, neighborhood opposition had kept the wrecking crews at bay, but no one was sure for how long. While we waited, the owners of buildings on either side of the proposed condo had also been approached to sell. They were holding out so far but, threatened with months, perhaps years of major construction next door, I could understand why they might take the money and run. If they did, the owners of two more neighboring buildings might do the same thing, and the dominoes falling would change Fabian Gardens beyond recognition. The conflict made the association meetings more contentious than usual, which was saying something. Meanwhile, the buildings had been empty for months, providing a place for rallies and demonstrations against the project and its developer, as irritating and obvious as a broken tooth.
The neighborhood had been a refuge to me; I hated to see it destroyed, and I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of a massive construction site taking up half the street, blocking off parking and filling the air with construction dust. Nat was clearly picturing the same scenario. “Doubtful. It’ll go ahead—it’ll be a two-year nightmare of dirt and noise and backhoes parked in the street, and sidewalks blocked off, and I’m already wishin’ I lived somewhere else.” He tipped his glass and finished his wine. I poured us both another glass, emptying the second bottle. “It leaves the D’Allessios as suspects number one and two, since their place is next door, but they’re in their seventies, and I’m pretty sure Katrina could take them,” Nat said.
“A gun trumps just about anything, though, doesn’t it? If one of them was sitting in the passenger seat, they could shoot her without a struggle or anything.”
“Just because they’re Italian doesn’t mean they’re gangsters, English. They sponsor the local Grandmothers Against Gun Violence group; I’d lay money they’re not packin’.”
I snorted.
He went on. “On the other side it’s all renters. I guess they wouldn’t want to move and lose their rent controlled apartments, but Angie Lacerda’s gettin’ married and movin’ out anyway, and Jesus and his partner, whatsisname, have been gone all month on that hike through Machu Picchu or wherever the hell they went. So they didn’t do it.”
“Darkest Peru somewhere. They might have paid someone, you know, a hit man,” I said doubtfully.
“You sayin’ ‘hitman’ in that accent of yours is the damdest thing I’ve heard all week.”
I ignored that. “A couple of people switched sides recently,” I said, thinking of my friend Sabina and her surgeon husband, Kurt. “Maybe money or blackmail or some other kind of pressure?”
“I don’t think Katrina’d be above blackmail. Seems like just her style. She sure tried”—he stopped short—“Anyway, I wouldn’t put anythin’ past her.”
I concentrated on not looking self-conscious, since I was fairly sure Katrina’s heavy-handed hints the day before were a prelude to exactly that. It was typical Katrina, giving me a taste of her poison without actually making me swallow.
I needed the wall between my real life and my fake life to hold. For that to happen, I needed to know what Katrina had found out about me, and I suddenly realized there might be a way for me to find out.
“Where’d you go, Theo?” Nat asked suddenly.
I started and looked at him. “Sorry. Do you know what happens to a lawyer’s cases and files if they die suddenly?”
“Okaay,” he said, drawing it out, “quick change of topic. But you’re not the only one thinkin’ ahead. I already asked my lawyer friend Ricky. He says it’s not unusual, ’pparently, to have a plan all organized to turn their stuff over to some other lawyer who’s agreed to take care of things.”
“Huh. When does that happen?”
“I guess it has to be done pretty quick so deadlines and court dates don’t get missed. I bet Katrina’s office will be closed up by the cops for a day or two, but they’ll release it, so—any day now.”
Nat was giving me the side-eye, and I tried to look thoughtful. “So—the condo project will probably go ahead with whoever this new lawyer is.”
“Ricky’s guess would be yes—he said a change like that at the legal end of things wouldn’t bother or delay things much.”
I rapidly reviewed what little I knew about lawyers. If Grandfather’s solicitor here in San Francisco was typical, lawyers were belts-and-braces cautious, keeping paper files in their offices in addition to computer files on a distant server. Presumably the police had removed Katrina’s computer as part of their investigation, but they would have no reason to remove the duplicate paper files—would they? And if not, they would be available to anyone with access to the file room. Whatever Katrina had found out about me would be there.
Assuming Nat was right about the police investigation time line, if I was going to get into her office to look around, it had to be soon.