Let Us Prey Read online

  “We appreciate it, Baxter.”

  Back down in the searing glare of the afternoon sun, I climbed in behind the wheel, and Dehan put the air-con on. I fired up the engine, and we started back toward the 43rd.

  “I don’t know about you, Dehan, but I am having trouble visualizing this whole situation.”

  She nodded. “Yup, me too.”

  “Talk me through it.”

  “Okay, here is Steve the yegg…”

  “Yegg?” I laughed. “You have been reading Mickey Spillane.”

  “I love Mickey Spillane. So here is Steve, a small-time yegg. He’s in his apartment. Maybe Tammy is there with him, over from Frisco for some reason.” I smiled at her, but she ignored me. “There is a hammering at the door, and one of them opens it. Maybe Tammy. And the boys come in. Let’s say for now it’s the Sureños. Maybe he burgled some place for them, or he stole something that belongs to them. Whatever the case, they either want it or they want to know where it is. Okay so far?”

  “Keep shingin’, shweetheart, you’re doing fine.”

  “So they slap him around a bit. They tie him to the chair, and they lay into him. What’s she doing meantime? She’s crying, ‘don’t hurt him, don’t kill him,’ yadda yadda. Then what? She’s getting on the Sureños’ nerves and they shoot her? They threaten him, if he doesn’t talk they shoot her? Maybe she tried to protect him. Point is, for some reason they shoot her…” She sighed and shook her head. “But it doesn’t make any sense. The report says the two shots were close together. So, what, they shot her and then shot him? Why, if they were after information that one of them had? Why kill both? Maybe they got the information and decided to kill them both, but then why take her away with them and leave him?” She stared at me through her aviators. “Shooting her doesn’t make sense.”

  “That’s the bit I’m having trouble visualizing.”

  “So where do we go from here?”

  “We need more background. We need to carry out research.”

  “What kind of research?”

  I looked out at the oppressive, sweltering city outside. I turned to her and grinned. “You know? San Francisco rarely rises above sixty-eight Fahrenheit, even at the height of summer.”

  THREE

  Back at the station, the air-con still wasn’t fixed. Dehan grabbed a bottle of cold water from the dispenser and set herself to doing a background check on Tamara Gunthersen. I went to have a chat with the captain.

  He scowled out of the open window from his desk, and the ventilator moved his hair on its steady sweep across the room. He had his jacket slung on the back of his chair, and I could see the damp patches on his shirt under his arms.

  “San Francisco, huh? How long for?”

  “I wouldn’t think more than a day or two at most.”

  He turned a smile on me that was less a smile than a malevolent leer. “This wouldn’t be just an excuse, would it, John? I wouldn’t mind a couple of days in the Bay myself—get away from this infernal heat!”

  “No, sir, but I do think it is important to get the background on Tamara Gunthersen. At the moment, the whole case seems to revolve around her. It seems Baxter’s client is trying to find out what happened to her. Her past may hold the key to what she was doing here, and why they were both killed.”

  “Hmm… well, if you think it’s essential. But just a couple of days, John, and try to keep your expenses down, will you?”

  “Of course, sir.”

  I skipped down the stairs feeling somewhat buoyed and found Dehan at her desk, on the phone. She hung up as I sat down.

  “Tamara Gunthersen has no police record. Information available on her—” She tapped at her computer and brought up the research she’d done while I was talking to the captain. “She was a homeowner; property is a house on Brooks Street, San Mateo. There is no foreclosure notice on it, so I’m guessing the mortgage was all paid up. She had a credit card, and she is listed as having defaulted on payments for the last two years. She has a bank account with First Republic that is in credit. That’s what I have been able to find out so far.”

  “Good work.”

  “I also called the lab and asked them if they had taken samples of the blood on the floor. He wasn’t sure, so I asked him to find out. I also asked him, if they had, to please analyze it and compare it with Stephen’s. And if it wasn’t his, to run it through the system.”

  “Great. Good work.” I gazed out the window. The long dusk was settling outside, preparatory to a muggy, sultry evening. “We’ll need to look inside her house. I’ll get the captain to clear it with the San Mateo PD.” I turned to face her. “Book us on the first flight out of here, Dehan. Then let’s go pack.”

  We touched down at San Francisco International Airport at eleven a.m. the following morning. The sun was bright, but the temperature was an agreeable sixty-eight degrees. I had rented a Mustang V8 convertible, because I like to have a good car, and we turned left out of the airport along the Bayshore Freeway, with the wind in our hair, and headed for San Mateo.

  Dehan had booked us a couple of rooms at the Hillsdale Inn, which was about a mile and a half from Brooks Street, where Tamara had her house. The hotel was remarkable for being completely unremarkable, and also for having a parking lot the size of an international airport. We checked into our rooms, which were functional, and Dehan called Hank, our liaison officer at the San Mateo Police Department, which was two hundred yards away, across East Hillsdale Boulevard.

  We met him in the lobby fifteen minutes later. He was big and friendly and looked as though he’d put on his even bigger brother’s clothes by mistake that morning. He walked toward us with big strides and shook hands with us like he was really genuinely pleased to meet us. He shoveled his floppy blond hair out of his face and pulled an envelope from a small folder he was carrying.

  “I talked to the judge yesterday evening, Dehan, and explained the situation—you were coming from New York, grounds for suspecting homicide, blah blah—and got you a search warrant for the premises. Do you need me to come along?” I drew breath to answer, but he didn’t let me. “Strictly, I should, but I am happy to let you go on your own if that works for you. Obviously, if you need to damage the property in any way, dig, knock down walls, blah blah, you should call me. Or if you find anything of importance like a meth lab or a body. But if you are just going to look around…” He made a face and spread his hands—hands I figured were pretty full and could do without babysitting visitors from the Big Apple.

  “We’re fine. We’ll call you if anything major shows up.”

  He handed me a card. “I’ve arranged for a locksmith to meet you there in…” He glanced at his watch. “Twenty minutes. You’ll report back to me when you’re done?”

  We told him we would and made our way to the car as he strode back to his, shoveling his hair out of his face once more.

  It was a short drive down East Hillside Boulevard and left onto South Norfolk. Brooks Street was in a quiet, residential area that couldn’t have been further from the Bronx. She had a cute, two-story house beyond what had probably been a nice front garden two years ago, with a crazy paved path winding through flower beds to a friendly red door by a big bow window. Today it was overgrown and running to seed.

  The locksmith was there, waiting in his van. He unlocked the door for us, made us sign a piece of paper, and went on his way. We stepped inside.

  There was a pile of mail behind the door. Dehan hunkered down to gather it up. The place smelled musty and unlived-in. The drapes were drawn, and there was only a filtering of light to alleviate the gloom. To the right of the door, a flight of stairs rose to an upper floor. To the left, there was an open-plan living room, dining area, and a kitchen, separated by a breakfast bar. There was a sofa and two chairs arranged around a TV. A framed photograph of a very pretty young girl with a middle-aged man and woman stood on a small bookcase that held mainly DVDs and CDs. The books were Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan trilogy, three books by
Stanislavski, Norma Jean by Fred Lawrence Guiles, and three self-help books by authors I had never heard of: Dream Yourself Happy, It’s Not Your Fault, and Rebirth in Life: A Guide to Rebecoming. There was also a scrapbook in which she had pasted reviews of plays she had been in.

  As I was reading through them, I became aware of the hum of the fridge. There was a table lamp nearby, and I reached out and switched it on. It cast a dull, amber glow. Dehan was at the table leafing through the mail and turned to look at me. I stood, went to the kitchen, and opened the fridge. It was full of rotting, moldy cheese and vegetables. I closed it and leaned on the breakfast bar to look at Dehan.

  She said, “There’s been enough money in her bank to cover her electricity bills, which must have been minimal. But more important than that, she was intending to come home. She was not planning on staying in New York, or on disappearing. If she had been, she would have cleaned out her account and disconnected the electricity.”

  I nodded. “What have you got there?”

  “Not much. A few bills, invoices. But this could be useful. It seems she’s an actress; this is a letter from her agent, Philip Shaw.”

  I frowned. “I didn’t think anybody wrote letters anymore.”

  “These are statements. Maybe she wanted hard copies.” She glanced at me and smiled. “Maybe her agent is a dinosaur.”

  “There are a few of us left. We’d better go and have a talk to him.”

  We had a look upstairs. There were still clothes in her closet and her dresser. They were of a surprising variety, from torn jeans and sweatshirts to elegant ball gowns and cocktail dresses, from the demure to the downright outrageous. Dehan raised an eyebrow at them. “I guess an actress needs all this.”

  “Most women,” I said, with the air of one who knew, “like to dress differently for different occasions. They don’t wear the same jeans and boots day in, day out.”

  “Like you’d know.”

  She had a dressing table with lots of makeup, and in the bathroom, her toothbrush was gone, but most of her toiletries were still there. Dehan sat on the end of the bed and scrunched up her face.

  “So here is an actress, living in a nice house in the Bay Area. She has an agent, and she is obviously working because she has money in the bank and she’s keeping this house on her own. One day she ups and goes to New York, but not just New York—the Bronx. She is not planning to stay there; she is planning to come back soon, so it’s just a visit. While she’s there, she visits this loser, Stephen Springfellow, the Sureños show up, beat seven bales of shit out of him, and then shoot them both. They leave him dead where he is on the chair, and take her body away with them.”

  I was leaning on the bathroom doorjamb listening to her. “Doesn’t make a lot of sense. We need to know why she went to New York.”

  “Maybe she got a gig there and that’s how she met Stephen…” But even as she said it, she was looking unconvinced. “He doesn’t strike me as the theater-going type. I think they met here.”

  There was something nagging at the back of my mind. “Didn’t the file say Stephen had been living in San Francisco?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, for a couple of years. Then went back east in 2014. They could have met here.”

  “So maybe she went back for some kind of reconciliation.”

  “Why suddenly? What happened to make her suddenly want to go out east and meet up with him?”

  “We need to talk to her agent.”

  FOUR

  The Philip Shaw Agency was on Pine Street in the Nob Hill district. We found a parking space just outside the Intercontinental Hotel and walked the short distance through the gentle sunshine to the agency. It was on the top floor of an elegant, early–twentieth-century, three-story building. There was no reception area and no elevator. So we climbed the blue-carpeted stairs to the top floor, knocked, and went in without waiting for a reply.

  There was a bright, efficient-looking woman of fifty with permed hair sitting behind a desk. She smiled at us as though she really was pleased to see us. Maybe it was a San Francisco thing.

  “Hello,” she said, without affectation.

  I smiled back and said, “We’d like to see Mr. Shaw. We haven’t got an appointment, but it is urgent.” I showed her my badge. “I am Detective Stone, and this is Detective Dehan.”

  She looked at the badges with interest. “New York…”

  She got up and went through a door into what was obviously Shaw’s office. She came out a moment later and said, “Mr. Shaw will see you now, Detectives.”

  I don’t know what I expected, but he wasn’t it. He was very tall, maybe six three or four, and shaped roughly like an inverted S, with his knees slightly bent and his back slightly hunched, as though his body was too long for his muscles to hold him upright. His feet were huge and so were his hands, one of which he held out now as he strode toward us, while he used the other to sweep a mop of unkempt hair out of his face. Maybe that was a San Francisco thing too.

  “Detectives, I have very little time.” He said it with a big smile, as if he’d meant to say, “What a pleasure to meet you,” but got his lines mixed up. “You’re a long way from home. What can I do for you?”

  I smiled. “Yeah, the local PD know we’re here, and they’re cooperating with us. We are just looking into some background, and we wanted to ask you about a client of yours from about two years back.”

  He gestured me to a chair and pulled up another for Dehan. Then he kind of folded himself up into his own on the other side of the desk, frowning as though he really was interested.

  “Two years back?”

  “Tammy Gunthersen.”

  His eyebrows shot up. “Tammy? What has she got herself into? Gorgeous girl! Gorgeous! Adorable personality. Could have been a big star. But a bit too wild in the wrong ways, and too eager for the quick solution. Talented, very talented. Lovely girl. But I haven’t seen her for… well… yes, two years would be about right.”

  Dehan was watching him with a small frown on her face. “Can you think of any reason why she would have gone to New York?”

  He looked blank and shook his head. “None whatsoever. One day she just stopped calling, stopped answering my messages, and I never heard from her again.”

  I scratched my chin. “She doesn’t seem to have been short of money. Did she get plenty of work?”

  Shaw nodded and spread his hands, like he was about to explain a difficult lesson to a class. “In many ways, Tammy was the perfect client. She was always willing to work. She’d take the good jobs with the bad jobs and always put in one hundred percent. Plus, she was gorgeous and had a charming personality, so people always wanted her back. But of course that meant doing all kinds of work, from small ads for local channels, to local theater groups and…” He made a reluctant face. “…‘gigs,’ what we call ‘gigs.’”

  Dehan scowled. “What are gigs?”

  “Gigs come in all shapes and sizes, and believe me, I will not touch the more unsavory ones! But often they can be lifesavers for young actors, the difference between paying the rent and being out on the streets.” He hunched his shoulders and nodded several times. “So, it can be some kind of living theater: a guy is having a big party, and he wants some gangsters to break in with guns and he single-handedly defeats them. Then it is all revealed as a play. Or a fight breaks out between two female guests and they start fighting, but using spectacular, choreographed kung fu. You get the kind of thing. That’s at the high end.”

  “And at the low end?” I asked.

  “Mainly guys acting out their fantasies. They go to a bar, and a gorgeous girl comes in and picks them up. Where it goes from there is up to the girl. I am not a pimp. A visiting businessman wants a beautiful woman on his arm, but he’d rather a talented actress who can hold a conversation than some bimbo whose whole repertoire is giggle and fuck.”

  Dehan asked, “And Tammy did a lot of gigs?”

  He made a “so-so” face. “She had pretty regular work at th
e Melpomene Theater on Jones Street. Mainly experimental, high-brow stuff, but she was popular and she was getting lots of work with them. Then she would supplement her income with the occasional gig.”

  I asked the question that was begging to get asked. “I know it’s a long time, Mr. Shaw, but can you remember what the last job you gave her was?”

  He thought for a moment, knitting together his big eyebrows. “As a matter of fact, I can. Partly because I never saw her again, and partly because it was quite some gig.”

  Dehan narrowed her eyes. “Yeah? How so?”

  He glanced at his filing cabinet, bit his lip for a second, and muttered, “Let me see…” Then he rattled at his computer for a moment. He clicked his mouse a few times and then smiled.

  “Mr. G. Sanders. He was interviewing actresses for a very special gig. It was for a party at a millionaire’s house, and he was going to put on an impromptu show in honor of his host. He was paying two hundred bucks a night for ten days, plus expenses. A few girls auditioned, but she got the job. He paid up front, and that was the last I ever heard from her.” He frowned. “So, is she in trouble? Is there anything I can do to help her? Does she need a lawyer?”

  I shook my head. “There is nothing you can do to help her, Mr. Shaw. It seems that shortly after she got that job, she went to New York. We don’t know why. But once there, we have reason to believe she was murdered.”

  All the color drained from his face, and he dropped back in his chair. “Oh, no. No, poor Tammy. Oh, no…”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Shaw.” I watched the tears spring into his eyes. “Were you close?”

  He spread his hands. “Why do these things happen? We were family. We’re all family. The actors, they come and go, they do stupid things, mostly, but we stay in touch. We’re a family. Poor Tammy. She didn’t deserve that.”

  “Do you know of any friends or family she had in the Bronx?”