Chapter 19

Now I had to call Eric.

As soon as Bobby went on his way to his dad’s gift shop, I dashed out to my car where I could talk in privacy. But once the phone started to ring, I realized my choice of location for the call had been a mistake. The rain pelting the T-Bird’s canvas ragtop sounded like my high school marching band’s percussion section pounding out a drum cadence six inches from the top of my head.

“Hi, Sal,” Eric said.

“Hey, you. So, I have an update about Gino.”

“What’s that noise?” he asked. “It sounds like you’re inside a machine shop.”

“I’m in my car and it’s kind of raining out there, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“You’re not driving, are you?”

“No, Mr. DA, I’m parked outside Solari’s. I just didn’t want a bunch of people hearing what I have to say.”

“That good, is it?”

“You tell me. It looks like Gino was suffering from copper poisoning when he died.”

I wasn’t positive, because it could have been the wind howling outside my car windows, but I was pretty sure Eric’s response was a long, exasperated sigh. “Okay, I’ll bite,” he finally said. “And why, exactly, do you think this?”

Now for the tricky part. Was there any possible way I could tell him about the hair analysis test without mentioning how I’d found Gino’s wool fisherman’s cap?

No, there wasn’t. Nothing for it but to jump right in and hope Eric didn’t immediately home in on that portion of my story.

“Okay, remember how we talked about the possibility of Gino getting lead poisoning from painting his boat? Well, I sent some of his hair to—”

“His hair? Where the hell did you get any of Gino’s hair?”

So much for his not homing in on that fact. “Hold your horses; I’ll get to that in a sec. Anyway, so I sent it to one of those online labs to test it for lead, and the results came back today.”

“But wait, you said copper poisoning, not lead.”

“I did. Because the analysis showed his levels of lead as being within the normal range. But his levels for copper were kind of high. And when I looked up copper poisoning online, I found out that a bunch of the symptoms are similar to lead poisoning and would explain a lot of Gino’s behavior of late—his acting drunk, getting angry, just generally being really out of it. And here’s the kicker: one of the most common causes of copper poisoning is using copper pots to cook highly acidic food, and I have it on good authority that Gino used to cook tomato sauce all the time in his copper pots.”

“You know those online hair analysis tests are considered to be exceedingly unreliable,” Eric said in his lecturing voice, “if not out-and-out scams. They just take your money and—” He stopped. “Hold on. Don’t think you can sidetrack me from the important question here. Where did you get this hair sample, anyway?”

“Uh, yeah … I’d been hoping you wouldn’t ask that.”

“Okay, Sal, fess up.”

“It was in Gino’s cap. Which I, uh … found…”

“Oh, Jesus.” There was a pause, and I had an image of Eric laying his head on his office desk as he silently cursed my name. “You mean to tell me you found Gino’s cap—a piece of highly relevant, possibly vital evidence—and did not turn it over to the police? What were you thinking?”

“I know, I know. But it’s only because of where I found it.”

“And where, pray tell, did you find it?” Eric asked in that way people do when they’re pretending to be patient and reasonable but the opposite is actually true.

“In my dad’s fishing skiff, shoved under the middle bench. I found it that day we were out there painting with Omar’s class and I went over to see if that guy’s bocce ball had dented the boat. I was so freaked out about finding Gino’s cap there that I didn’t tell anyone.”

“But I don’t get it. Why would you be freaked out by that?”

“Because it turns out Dad went fishing in that boat the morning after Gino disappeared. So, with finding the cap lodged under the seat like that, it looks like Gino must have been in the boat. And I’m afraid the police will take it one step farther and accuse Dad of killing Gino and then using his skiff to take the body out to sea and dump it.”

“Whoa, girl. That’s making an awful big jump. Why on earth would the cops suspect your father of killing Gino?”

I told Eric about my dad forcibly ejecting Gino from the Solari’s bar the day before he disappeared, and how Gino had thrown a punch at him in front of several witnesses. “And then the morning after Gino disappears, my dad goes fishing early in the morning, after which Gino’s cap is discovered hidden away in the boat? Not good.”

“Oh, boy.” Eric was quiet a moment. “Look,” he said, “the cops aren’t going to suspect Mario just because he threw Gino out of the bar. It’s a pretty weak motive for a murder, after all. And besides, you know they have to have other far better suspects by now.”

“You think so? Have you heard anything around the office?”

“No, not really.”

“Oh.” So he was just trying to be sweet. Which was nice, actually, because right about now I could truly use some support. But what I needed far more than emotional support was a real live suspect—other than my father.

“That doesn’t mean they haven’t got other suspects, though,” Eric added. “It’s not my case, so I wouldn’t necessarily hear.”

“Yeah, I know. But here’s another thing that makes it look even worse for Dad. I know you said the cops think that Gino was knocked on the head by someone and then thrown off the wharf, because of the mussel shell they found in his wound. But that doesn’t make any sense to me. If that’s what happened, how could his body have ended up on Its Beach? The wharf tides wash into shore, to Cowell’s, not around the point.”

“Hmmm…” Eric considered this a moment, and I listened to the sound of the rain on the ragtop, which had thankfully now decreased from its previous pounding to a mere patter.

“Wait,” he said, jarring me from the meditative state the rhythmic percussion had lulled me into. “This was the Monday night he disappeared, right? And just a few days later we got those Diablo winds.”

“So?”

“So, they’re offshore winds. If Gino ended up drowning in the water off the wharf, he would have pretty much immediately sunk after he died. The body would then have stayed where it was for at least several days until the gases that form inside after death made it float back up to the surface.”

“Yuck,” I said.

“Yeah, sorry. Anyway, let’s assume it took four days for that to happen, which I think is realistic, given the temperature of the ocean this time of year. By then, the offshore Diablo winds had come up, which would have caused the current to reverse, taking Gino’s body out to sea. After that, it could easily have washed up on Its Beach.”

“Really? Are you sure? How come you know so much about ocean currents?”

“I’m a surfer, remember? A huge part of surfing is understanding currents and tides. So, yeah, I’m sure.”

“Wow, that’s great! At least for my dad, anyway. Maybe he won’t now immediately be bumped up to suspect number one. Since it does make more sense for Gino to have knocked his head against the piers, which means he wasn’t in a boat at all.”

“Maybe,” Eric said. “But don’t you think for one second that this digression about where Gino’s body washed up is going to let you off the hook for suppressing that evidence, young lady. Where is the cap right now?”

“At home in my sock drawer.”

“What an original hiding place. Good thing no one’s broken into your house since you found it, or it would have been for sale on Craigslist by now.” Eric chuckled to himself before going on. “Now I know I don’t really have to tell you that as soon as we hang up, the next thing you’re going to do is take that cap down to the police station, correct?”

“I guess…”

“And that if you don’t tell them, I will?”

“Okay, fine. But if they haul my dad off to jail in handcuffs because of this, I’ll never ever forgive you.”

“Hey, once you tell the cops your theory about the copper poisoning and all about the super-professional online lab that procured the results, they’re going to get down on their knees to thank you for discovering such a crucial piece of evidence in the case. They’re gonna be so thrilled, in fact, that they’ll completely forget all about your dad.”

So much for the sweet, supportive Eric. “Ha-ha. Very funny.”

“That’s why I’m laughing.” And he was. A lot.

*   *   *

Twenty minutes later, after swinging by my house to retrieve Gino’s cap, I was standing in line at the Santa Cruz Police Department’s reception desk. As I waited for the woman ahead of me to finish her discussion about obtaining a permit for a protest march downtown, I sent my dad a text telling him I wouldn’t be at the restaurant for another half hour. Hopefully he wouldn’t ask me the reason for my delay.

“Hi,” I said when I stepped up to the counter. “I’m here because I have some evidence that may relate to the Gino Barbieri case.”

“What sort of evidence?” the woman asked.

I held the plastic bag up for her inspection. “This.” But then, realizing she’d have no idea what was inside, I added, “It’s Gino’s cap, which I found out on the wharf. I put it in this so it wouldn’t get contaminated.” The manner in which she was eyeing the dark green bag suggested she had a dog and knew what its normal purpose was.

“Okay,” she said, and picked up the phone. “Let me get a detective to come down and talk to you. What’s your name?”

I told her, and the woman spoke for a moment to someone and then replaced the receiver. “Detective Vargas will be down shortly.”

Great. I took a seat on the wooden bench in the lobby and waited, trying to keep my jimmy legs to a minimum. Why couldn’t it have been someone else? Anyone but him.

Sooner than I expected, Vargas’s burly frame emerged from the door that led into the police department offices. He stood there a moment without speaking and then motioned for me to come inside.

“When Erica said it was you, I thought it best that I come down,” the detective said as we mounted the steps to the investigation department. “Since I’m accustomed to your, shall we say, proclivity for trying to help us do our job?”

I didn’t respond to this, instead following him silently into the small interview room that I’d gotten to know quite well over the past six months.

“So what is this evidence you have?” the detective asked after we’d both gotten settled, me on the small couch, him on the armchair across from me.

I lay the plastic bag on the coffee table between us. “I found this on the wharf. It’s Gino Barbieri’s wool cap.”

Vargas took the pen from his shirt pocket and used it to open the bag. “How do you know it’s his?” he asked.

“Everyone knows that cap,” I said. “It’s a Genovese-style fisherman’s cap, and no one else wore one like it. Plus, you can tell from the faded color that it’s Gino’s.”

“Uh-huh.” The detective took the bag by its bottom and dumped the cap out onto the table. “Where exactly did you find it?”

“Uh … it was in my father’s skiff, the little boat he keeps behind our restaurant for fishing. I found it jammed under the seat.”

He poked at the cap for a moment with his pen and then sat back in his chair. “And when did you find the cap?”

“Well, it was a few days ago, actually. I’ve been meaning to bring it down to you, but…”

“When, exactly?” He’d now leaned forward again and was giving me a “cut the crap, lady” look.

“Last Saturday,” I said, almost in a whisper. The small room was becoming claustrophobic as I felt the heat build up under my long-sleeved T-shirt. Not a good time for a hot flash.

“Last Saturday?” he bellowed back, jumping from his chair. “It took you five days to turn over evidence relevant to a possible homicide investigation?” The detective glared down at me, and I did my best to shrink into the recesses of the couch. “Why the hell would you wait so long? Oh, wait, I get it.” He smiled, but the smile wasn’t of the jolly, friendly variety. “It’s because of where you found the cap—in your father’s boat. So, tell me: What do you know about your father that would cause that discovery to make you so nervous?”

I didn’t answer right away. It was one thing to merely fail to volunteer information, but to tell an actual, bald-faced lie to a police detective would be a giant step toward the criminal—as in, “making false statements to an officer of the law” kind of crime.

“I … well…”

“Yes?” The smile grew even broader. The detective was enjoying this.

“Okay. I found out my dad took his skiff out fishing the morning after Gino disappeared, and I was afraid you’d think he had something to do with Gino’s death since the cap was found in his boat.”

Vargas shook his head. “No matter how tiresome I might find your insistence on getting involved in police matters, I would never allow that to cloud my judgment in a case. And I hardly see how the mere fact that the hat was found in your father’s boat would lead us to suspect him of killing Mr. Barbieri. It could have just fallen off and ended up there.”

And then got itself miraculously hidden away, jammed under the seat? But since I’d already mentioned where in the boat I’d found the cap, I saw no need to repeat this tidbit of information.

The detective had finally sat back down, but he was still eyeballing me. “I’m thinking there’s something else, too. Am I right?”

I had to hand it to the guy. He did seem to have a knack for reading people’s thoughts and body language.

“Uh-huh,” I said. “There is one more thing. My father eighty-sixed Gino—you know, kicked him out of the Solari’s bar—the day before he went missing. And they kind of got into a scuffle over it. Gino was pretty mad and apparently threw a punch at my dad.”

Vargas frowned, then picked up a pad of paper that was sitting on the small table next to him. Clicking open his ballpoint pen, he jotted something down and set the pad back on the table.

Definitely not good that this merited a note. Time to divert his attention to something other than my father.

“So there’s another piece of evidence I need to tell you about, too, and this one I only just found out today.”

The detective leaned back in the chair, hands clasped behind his head. “Uh-huh?”

“Well, you need to know first that a bunch of people have been talking about how Gino had seemed to be drinking a lot over the past few months and that he was acting different in other ways, too. Picking fights with people—”

“Like your father,” Vargas said.

“Yeah, like my dad, and other people, too. Anyway, as you know, there are witnesses who say he was acting drunk that night he came into Solari’s before he disappeared, but his tab from the meal shows he only ordered two beers with dinner.”

The detective glanced at his watch, and I decided I’d best get to the point quickly. “So I got this idea that maybe something else was going on with Gino, and then got to thinking about how he was always painting his boat, and it occurred to me that maybe he was suffering from lead poisoning.”

“Oh, boy.” Vargas sat forward impatiently.

“So I took some of his hair and sent it to this place to get analyzed.”

“You what?”

Now I had his interest back. I explained how the test had come back negative for lead (at which point the detective smiled) but how his copper levels were higher than normal. Pulling the report from my purse, I handed it to Vargas, who studied the paper while I went on.

“I heard from Bobby, the guy who’s been working for him, that Gino used to cook tomato sauce in his copper pots all the time, which could totally give him copper poisoning, and which would explain his weird behavior over the past few months.”

Vargas lowered the report. “I fail to see how his having copper poisoning, even if true, would help us determine how he was killed, which is all I’m really concerned about at this point.”

“But don’t you see? If Gino was all of a sudden acting totally irrational because of copper poisoning, that could have been the reason someone did it. So at least it gives you a motive for his killing.”

“Right.” But Vargas did not appear convinced. “Where did you get this hair sample, anyway?”

“I … from the cap. There was a ton of hair in it, so I figured it couldn’t hurt if I took a little bit…”

The detective stood up again and pointed to the door. “Out,” he commanded. “Get out right now, before I change my mind and have you taken downstairs and booked not only for suppression of evidence, but for tampering with it as well.”